After eviction SquatSpace became the moniker for an artists’ collective, comprising Bonetto, de Souza, Ihlein and Quick, with Jimmy Sing and Dave Toecutter, that was determined to artistically address issues of housing and autonomy.[^5] Following interventions in urban space, such as unReal Estate (2002) for Newcastle’s This is Not Art festival and SquatFest (2001–10), an […]

‘Actions live off the images’ So said one of the plenary speakers at the Lausitz Climate Camp, following the first day of action. On the previous night an action primer video, a short documentary following activists from camp to pit to police van during last year’s Ende Gelände, was screened in the camp’s central circus […]

To throw around polyphony with an unstructured multiplicity and plurality is now a commonplace. Ideas of fluctuating disunity and rhizomatic structures clumsily circulate around the contemporary dialogue, resembling what some now terrifyingly call a ‘classic’ postmodernism. Yet there is more to say about polyphony than this now-normalised discourse, and Polyphonic Social stresses this shifting rhetoric. […]

I remember walking past the vacant retail space on the corner of Lonsdale and Swanston Streets, quietly charting the course of its transformation. The shop came to be filled, sparingly, with trestle table desks, flat-pack cardboard boxes and rolls of packaging tape. The most salient clue that this store was ready to trade came with […]

The fact is that MUMA exists as an institution, and they do put on shows. So the question is, what should be in the shows that they put on? I don’t think everyone should just stop making art and get into activism. But by the same token, no one should feel that enough has been […]

I recently applied for a job as a lawyer and met a new friend, The Ghost of Félix Guattari, The Famous French Philosopher and Psychotherapist Who’s Been Dead for Fourteen Years and is Currently Stuck in a Psychotherapeutic Purgatory. His apparition appeared to me as I attempted to fill out an Application for Employment Form, […]

Laura Castagnini : I met Rose Gibbs in December 2015 when I attended a two-day workshop at the Showroom in London entitled, fittingly, Our Future Network. Led by the artist Alex Martinis Roe, our small group of participants experimented with feminist collective strategies by undertaking a series of exercises developed from research into the Milan […]

Emile Zile is an artist, performer and filmmaker crafting poetic turns about the relationship between digital media and social conditions. His work provides a penetrating critique of how the manufactured outputs of the mass media and technology industries interact with our bodies, behaviours and feelings. It offers, in the artist’s words, ‘damaged optimism’ for humans […]

Jimmy Nuttall’s 2016 short film, GINA, is a reflection on contemporary malaise that borrows its structure as much from the haphazard mode of home movie-making as any historical avant-garde. Shot in Melbourne and its surrounding rural landscape, the video tells an experimental post-breakup narrative of Gina and Jules that begins with a cast of Jim’s […]

At Day for Night all of the artists are not from the same scene. At the 2016 iteration of the festival Stereogamous, artists who have performed in bathhouses and on the international club scene, soundtracked most of the event but also acted as the main act four times across the weekend: The Day for Night […]

[^1] I remember when it happened. It was sometime between 2010 and 2012. The change took at least a couple of years to implement. We were living in Berlin then, traveling around Europe in the typical itinerant fashion, making manageable works of art and generally having an enjoyable time. My employer, Georgina Criddle, was banging […]

‘FOR THE CHICKEN = AGAINST THE CHICKEN.’[^1] The art world has been a major economic beneficiary of globalisation. The reduction of the costs of communication and transportation, coupled with the attenuation of barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, and technology has drastically expanded the art market. Economist Joseph Stiglitz, when noting the devastating […]

Amidst the otherwise rather austere mise-en-scène of a winter’s day at the Monash Art Design and Architecture (MADA) campus, the resplendent blue structure that is Gormenghast proves easy to find. Standing more than five metres tall, with a ground area of almost thirty square metres, the two-level wooden frame takes pride of place in the […]

THE NUMBER YOU HAVE REACHED 1–29 May 2016 SUCCESS Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Michael Candy, Antoinette J Citizen, JD Reforma, Andrew Varano, Tim Woodward, Greatest Hits (Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn) Curated by Sarah Werkmeister & Tim Woodward To start with, I get the opening hours wrong, and make the half-hour train trip […]

Sophia Dacy-Cole interviews artist and theorist Erin Manning on her keynote ‘For a Pragmatics of the Useless’ at the Transversal Matters conference, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, September 2015. SDC : un 10.1 focuses on Russian theorist Boris Aratov’s concept of the co-worker: the idea that objects are not merely inert, but have some […]

Meret Oppenheim made her furry-lined teacup on a whim. She made it quickly when she was young, then she spent a large part of the rest of her career trying to replicate its triumph. She was forever a slave to that early object’s success. We saw David Byrne sing Burning Down the House some years […]

Shelley McSpedden & Meredith Turnbull : Russian Constructivist theorist, Boris Arvatov, promoted the potential of ‘things’ to act as dynamic agents for social and political change. Does such a model of objects have relevance to the work that you do? Tahjee Moar : Boris Arvatov’s notion of ‘co-worker’ and the potential of ‘things’ to act […]

— Der Unterricht In German bread is brot and butter is butter I know this because I’m Toaster In German toaster is toaster — kitchen is küche that’s where I live and work mornings mostly in between Wasserkessel who’s desperate to please and Mauer who never speaks or moves What respect I have for Mauer! […]

Spooky Action at a Distance at Bus Projects, 9–30 January 2016 Amalie Smith, Amitai Romm, David Stjernholm, Rasmus Myrup, Valérie Collart and curated by Nanna Stjernholm Jepsen The polar icecaps have melted and Bus Projects finds itself submerged in the underwater world of Spooky Action at a Distance. This exhibition is the second, return iteration […]

Public Share is a New Zealand–based collective of seven artists (Monique Redmond, Harriet Stockman, Kelsey Stankovich, Deborah Rundle, Mark Schroder, Joe Prisk and, until recently, Kirsten Dryburgh) founded in 2014. Their work involves nuanced conversations embedded in acts of making and sharing. With a keen interest in participatory happenings, Public Share’s work has occupied allotted […]