un Projects is based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation; we pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.
un Projects

Justin Clemens & Helen Johnson

Porosity, machine, subtraction, substitution: on the formal address to politics in works by Brighid Fitzgerald, Rosie Isaac, Nicholas Mangan and Tom Nicholson

We started thinking about different forms by which art makes an address to politics after a visitor commented on a perceived lack of political content in Australian art. As a local said of such opinions: ‘It’s like they think we don’t have e-flux here.’ So we tried to identify different manifestations of politics in some […]

Patrice Sharkey

Channel G, West Space, 21 June – 13 July 2013

In June and July 2013, Sean Peoples staged Channel G at West Space, transforming the gallery’s back space into a temporary, makeshift film studio that broadcast live and unscripted video content produced by an ensemble of local contemporary artists and friends of Peoples. As viewers of Channel G, we were privy to a wide range […]

Tara McDowell

This monstrous neologism: on Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux

^11 Les Immatériaux, then, is as backward glancing as it is imagining of a technological future. And here is it haunted by one figure more than any other: Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is the very first artist Lyotard mentions in the Flash Art interview. He’s a game-changer of modernism who dispenses with modernist notions of the […]

Daniel Withers

Monochrome Exhibition, Sutton Project Space, 22 August – 14 September 2013

Nearly a century after the Russian Supremacists, the contemporary relevance of the monochrome painting is explored in a considered exhibition at Sutton Projects. David Homewood’s curatorial statement speaks of the complications with our traditional process in trying to make sense of a painting when considering the monochrome. Instead of focusing on whether we like the […]

Michael Ascroft

The controversy over Like Mike

Amelia Wallin

Taking Form, Agatha Gothe-Snape and Sriwhana Spong, curated by Anneka Jaspers, Contemporary Project Space, Art Gallery of NSW

Taking Form, a recent exhibition in the contemporary Project Space at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), presented six new works by Agatha Gothe-Snape and Sriwhana Spong, meditating the intersections between dance, choreography and language. Curated by Anneke Jaspers, the exhibition established a dialogue between the past and the present, exploring traces of […]

Scott McCulloch

Portrait of Riak

Since the viral sensation of Bangs with his song and video clip, Take U To Da Movies, a slew of African youth living in Melbourne have taken to rapping as a transformative mode of expression. Ezu, William 2k, Garang Garang, Clik Fablice/Flybz, D KAYZ, Prince Jay and Abiel are some of the names of the […]

Jesse Dyer

Une séance du cinéma

‘Didn’t the images and forms of modernism already have ruin, decay, and obsolescence written into them?’[^1] — Mark Lewis, Is Modernity our Antiquity? Daria Martin’s One of the Things that Makes Me Doubt is an ambiguous exhibition experience. The chattering of film projectors and the earthy soundtracks by Zeena Parkins resonate through the muddy acoustics […]

Harriet Kate Morgan

Aesthetic Suicide

The 2013 version of Silver Bullets begins with a re-edited excerpt from Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s 1967 film I, a Man, in which Solanas performs her own scripted lines. Condensed from the original nine minutes to two minutes, Burchill and McCamley’s re-edit showcases Solanas’s particular brand of table-turning humour, as she wittily refuses a sexual […]

Christopher Williams-Wynn

On the (im)possibility of anachronism in contemporary art

When investigating cultural understandings of time and space at the beginning of the twentieth century, historian Stephen Kern notes a rising contest between ideas of public (or social) time and private time in Europe.[^1] Public time is the realm of shared understandings of temporal experience, disseminated through calendars, clocks and the adoption of standard time, […]

Briony Galligan

Cemeti Art House on turning twenty-five

Mella Jaarsma and Nindityo Adipurnomo are artists and the Yogyakarta-based directors of Cemeti Art House, the art space they founded in 1988 in the front room of their house. Their aim for Cemeti was to exhibit new work and function as an information centre that promoted Indonesian artists over the longer term. Twenty-five years on, […]

Pippa Milne

The past is present: the curatorial act of exhibiting exhibitions

It sounds like an art world joke: What do you get when you pluck a 1969 exhibition from a German Kunsthalle and reconstruct it in an 18th-century Venetian palazzo, forty-four years later? Add some gallery attendants in Prada suits and an audience fresh from Massimiliano Gioni’s 55th Venice Biennale, and you have an answer that, […]

Thomas Jeppe

In time: emotional professionalism

Emotion TJ : Being mindful to sidestep sentimentality, tell me about how emotion comes into this. Because I think it is something of a cornerstone. RC : I was planning an essay about this show called ‘The Exhibition as Catharsis’. This is why I’m a bad curator on a few levels, I am a free-association […]

Sophia Dacy-Cole

The Artist Book Studio: the pitfalls of a nostalgic politic

I was recently lucky enough to spend two mornings in the Monash Artist Book Studio and Ancora Press headquarters. The space houses antiquated printing presses and their corresponding instruments: movable type, composing sticks, inks, etc. While I was in awe of the machines and tools housed within, and taken with the books that had been […]

Aodhan Madden

Bathing in cool water: an interview with Grace Cossington Smith*

Amanda Kouriroukidis

Divine comedies, they’re getting worse every year

An impeccable looking man in a tuxedo jacket and striped pants enters carrying a headless dressmaker’s dummy. He feigns marriage, puts a bunch of artificial flowers at the dummy’s feet, sits down, turns his back to the audience and begins to speak. As he speaks the tension in the room weighs heavier and heavier. Soon […]

Tom Melick

Ciao Giotto!

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: [email protected] Technical details of permanent failure: DNS Error: Domain name not found —– Original message —– From: Silvio Berlusconi Date: Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 11.58 PM Subject: Urgent!!!! 🙂 To: Giotto di Bondone Ciao! It’s me, Silvio. Drop what you’re doing. Drop the brushes and paints Giotto! […]

Bryan Spier

Naked and alone: Pat Larter, Laser-Print Painting, 1995

I confess to a prickling of embarrassment when I look at Pat Larter’s Laser-Print Painting of 1995. I first saw it at the opening of the Sarah Scout instalment of Geoff Newton’s epic Like Mike series. Here I found myself embarrassed to gaze too deeply at it, and ashamed to be seen averting my eyes. […]

Ellie Buttrose

Processing Disagreement: Part One, OtherFilm and Institute of Modern Art, 5 September 2013

Helen Johnson

Memory is not a recording device: on Eliza Hutchison’s Hair in the Gate, a biograph

In Australia, we struggle to insist on identity even as we are engulfed by the unrepresentable. I feel that this is a condition of being Australian. The moment we believe we have defeated the unrepresentable is the moment we have once again failed, retreating into construct only to await the next encroachment. Hutchison’s work is […]

Robert Shumoail-Albazi

Zoë Croggon, Pool, West Space, 19 July – 10 August 2013

The contradictory elements of dynamism at play throughout Zoë Croggon’s recent exhibition Pool at West Space, Melbourne, reflect an imitative relationship of both movement and stasis, often through the effective use of visual comparison. Comprising six collage prints fluently combining images of the human body in motion with architectural environments alongside a dance-based video piece, […]

Ian Haig

McCarthyism: Paul McCarthy, WS, The Armory, 19 June – 4 August 2013

The McCarthy era of post-war America in the late 1940s had its eyes firmly set on all things communist, as well as an Orwellian attitude towards subversive behavior. Namesake and bastard child of the era Paul McCarthy however, has his eyes set on all things perverse and fucked up in American culture. His massive exhibition […]

Julian Aubrey Smith

Leanne Hermosilla, Limited Visibility, Beam Contemporary, 8 June – 6 July 2013

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_ the_pictures/meaning_of_color/tool.php

Isabelle Sully

Kain Picken, Economy Class/Resort, West Space, 29 August – 14 September 2013

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