We’re not going to pull the death of the author on you again. No, not that again![^1] —Claire Fontaine, Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications, 2005 While researching for this piece I came across a blog article seeking to verify the popular attribution to Pablo Picasso of the quote: ‘Good artists copy; great […]

Cartoon meets calligraphy meets word game meets mind map. Such is the mode of Agatha Gothe-Snape’s Free Speaking, which ran at Gertrude Contemporary’s Studio 12 from 17 October to 15 November 2014. Marked with an almost-anachronistic handwritten immediacy, the suite of drawings were made perfunctorily by the artist over a period of one week, in […]

‘Google has created a monopoly in which every click produces value for the company. The next stage will be the conquest and appropriation of the ever-more-scarce non-clicks and user downtime as a value asset.’[^1] What you are about to undertake is a special type of guided meditation to help explore the issues you’ve been facing. […]

The relationship between society and image-production was explored in The Form That Accommodates The Mess, a program of four films curated by OtherFilm in collaboration with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Included were Robin Laurie and Margot Nash’s We Aim to Please (1976), Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder […]

Twenty years ago I was a University student fifteen years ago I was a Bachelor of Arts ten years ago I was an art writer & friend of artists two years ago I was a feminist…Now I am absolutely nothing.[^1] Chances are you truly understand the chronological progression this straightforward piece of poetry takes to […]

At the annual beekeepers fair in Berlin’s Prinzessinnengarten, one Imkerin[^1] describes the honey at her stall as ‘a gift from the bees’.She tells us how she asks her bees for permission to take their honey, what most bee­keepers call ‘robbing the hive’, and they agree as long as she passes it on to others. She […]

A year after Society ended—which to clarify for readers thinking that they missed some cataclysmic end to life as we know it, I am referring to an independent curatorial program that I ran in Sydney[^1]—I found myself on residence as an associate curator at the Amsterdam-based contemporary arts organisation If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t […]

I got some St Tropez gradual tan moisturiser for free in a magazine; I bought the magazine for the moisturiser. I’ve used it twice so far on my legs, trying to be careful and even, but already today I noticed a blobby stain of tan has appeared on my ankle. I must be doing something […]

As the clock struck midnight, a Witch appeared in the National Gallery of Victoria out of a cloud of dense, black fog. It was 4am. Fumbling with its robes and black pointed hat, a bottle of Flintstone-shaped multi­vitamins tumbled from a concealed pocket onto the floor and scattered about the space. On all fours, Witch […]

As in previous work by Nikos Pantazopolous, the installation of photographs in Wearing negotiates the symbolic and semiotic connections between public and private sexuality. The permeability of erotic experience within and around architecture is explored through a language of ‘place’ as defined by usage, coded and clandestine, modern and hist­orical. Where projects such as OMIA […]

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycho­linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. The following transcript is drawn from a conversation between Remie Cibis, Georgina Criddle, Tamsin Green and Rosina Prestia following the conference Topologies of Sexual Difference, hosted by the Luce Irigaray Circle, in The Communication, Politics and Culture Research Centre at […]

‘Inside every cell is a system beyond your own capacity for mathematics.’ —Eating and Speaking Aodhan MaddenReading each letter and word (cell) of your poems could be described as a systematic unsettling of the space between the reader and their world. What do you hope one can learn from (reorienting) the practice of reading? Astrid […]

let me talk you through this scenestraightwe could pretend it’s a bush dancebut reallyI’m at this bar / wherebodies mill by bricksand blue squares split the roomsitting sola on a black barstoolan egg on a nailno—hugging hello, goodbye, to friendswho have flown in from afar who will now fly outbyeand I’m having an ok timethey […]

‘The practice of happiness is subversive when it becomes collective.’[^1] The idea that we must move towards more collective ways of understanding ourselves as subjects is so commonly held it is almost a priori. Perhaps the most surprising and amusing call to community I have encountered recently is in K-Hole marketing report Youthmode. K-Hole is […]

The role that difference has played diachronically across various eras of feminist organisation presents us with this same ethos of contradiction. Where in the eighteenth century difference between the sexes was viewed as a limiting agency that sought to subordinate and control women’s aspirations, gendered difference became a liberating force for women of the nineteenth […]

An artist and a law graduate go to ‘Is Prison Obsolete’, a conference held by Sisters Inside, a group advocating to abolish prison and to provide advocacy for women.[^1] Feeling pretty unaware, seriously interested and somewhat illegitimate, they attempt to find a way through the murky social structures of race, gender, class, power and privilege. […]

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 […]

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 […]

Les Immatériaux roughly translates to ‘the immaterials’ or ‘the non-materials’. These materials are new in that they newly challenge our relationship to the world, whether through the dehumanisation of technology or by the faltering of man’s mastery over nature. And so the exhibition was filled with computers (often malfunctioning) but also artificial skin, Kevlar, and […]

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 […]

Mike Brown is however not the only artist in Australian history to have been convicted of obscenity. The second, less well known case involved Cath Phillips, a one-time artist, author and publisher, and also organiser at the Sydney Mardi Gras and the Gay Games. Following complaints about her installation Butch Maison: The Palace at Femme, […]

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 […]

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 […]

‘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 […]