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 […]
Anxiety about the possibility of historical honesty runs through many of the portfolio pieces. Daniel Boyd’s lithograph, Untitled (2015), gives the clearest example of how this anxiety has shaped the collection. The work layers and then filters a sequence of associations. Boyd researched his grandfather’s service in the Memorial’s archives and found details about where […]
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 […]
Dear Homophobia, It’s difficult to write this letter. I have trouble raising my voice above your incessant shouting, something you often do in unison with your friend, Patriarchy. When I do, I often feel I am not heard. Last Saturday night, you convinced a man to enter a gay nightclub in Orlando and kill as […]
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. […]
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 […]
— 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! […]
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 […]
The recent exhibitions of Melbourne artists Benjamin Woods, Georgina Criddle and Helen Grogan, consecutively programmed at West Space in 2015, can be seen to crystallise certain tendencies in contemporary local spatial practice.[^1] The current conversation around these projects centres on how they bring to the fore the dynamic but overlooked relations between objects, bodies and […]
Alana Hunt : You’ve worked extensively with Aboriginal art at major institutions in Australia, including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Gallery of Australia and, presently, in the New Museum Project at the Western Australian Museum. During this time you have maintained an ongoing focus on Indigenous objects in your work as a […]
Based in Vancouver, Zvonar’s practice regularly engages with metaphysics and mysticism. Notable works include Until Then Then (2006), in which the future of Voyager One and Two was read by psychics and astrologers and then mapped and etched onto two round mirrors which then repeatedly reflected each spaceship’s future into infinity, as well as her […]
The ornate floral display of Drakaea confluens; the hammer orchid mimics the appearance of the female Thynnid wasp in an evocative display. When the male wasp observes this sensuous flower it tries to mate with the orchid and so transfers its pollen. With this intimate inter-species encounter the wasp and the orchid become entangled in […]
One year earlier, in 1925, the Russian socialist theorist and art critic Boris Arvatov wrote that by discovering the underlying ‘relations between people and things, knowing [their] socio-historical substratum’, we could direct the developmental tendencies of material culture.[^2] The Present utilises the Past. The Past shifts the Present. Touches the Future (Card 6): Arvatov wanted […]
The deep clap of bronze against bronze reverberates over a stretch of space. Areas can be observed to stir, inhabitants rustled by the tongue’s shudder cast through the air. Even if this movement is not perceived aurally, it registers as an attunement of bodies. The narrator makes a low, thick noise — indecipherable. Morning time. […]
It’s early October and I’ve come to Bétonsalon Centre for Art and Research for the opening of Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster. Three months since arriving in Paris, disaster is already decidedly in the air. The United Nations COP21 climate change talks (expected by most to be its own car crash of performative political inaction) are not […]
We don’t create our song and dance like the way a rock ’n’ roll muso creates theirs. Our song and dance are given to us in two ways. They come from family, like an inheritance we become custodians for. And they come fresh in our dreams from spirits and Country. You know when you wake […]