The show is also partly about vagina. Vagina is not a theme but it is a thing that turns up in Georgette Brown’s painting Painfully aware at the moment of salvation (2015). There’s a vagina and a uterus with their own moon/egg in vibrating patterns of pastels and texture—a small piece of paua (mother of […]
acontented slave Can name six beaches where deeper riots started and haven’t finished his moral necessity synthetic polymer surfboards with a human debt when does a man cease to be a man standing up in the water the foam over print standing, making contact contact meaning death Wutan #2 mother on the other side of […]
Before a wall of mirrors, five performers dance for their reflections. The room heaves with bodies and music pumps through the crowd like a pulse. The audience beyond the mirrors can’t see the performers, only screens transmitting a live-feed of the performance just out of sight. They cheer anyway. Sydney-based performance artist Bhenji-Ra’s practice foregrounds […]
The conversation that follows is woven together from a series of emails and Skypes between Ariel Goldberg and myself. Goldberg’s first book of poetry The Photographer was recently published by Roof Books, New York. They are also curate Friday Nights at the Poetry Project in New York City. Our discussion centres on the forthcoming publication […]
In Aotearoa New Zealand ‘Pacific art’ as a descriptor is taken for granted. As a curator—New Zealand–born with Sāmoan and English heritage—the question of labelling frequently comes up for me. In addition to being described as a ‘Pacific art curator’, I’m also placed in positions where I too need to contextualise and situate artists’ practices, […]
Drawing from questions written with Adelle Mills and Pip Wallis, I met a few members of the Karrabing Film Collective (Linda Yarrowin, Rex Edmunds, Natasha Lewis, Gavin Bianamu, Elizabeth Povinelli and their friend, Susan Edmunds) during their time in Melbourne, in August. The collective were showing two short films at the Melbourne International Film Festival: […]
BETH CAIRD: Could you please introduce your practice to us, a largely new Australian audience, in the lead up to your show at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane? PATRICK STAFF: I suppose I am preoccupied at the moment with thinking about how particular bodies are presented, produced, represented and assessed. I am […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
the entire floor is a bath. the elevator opens up and you just step down into the bath. its about the size of five bedrooms. the roof and walls are painted blue black with the lighting installed to look like the milky way. it stretches across all of the ceiling. i am floating on my […]
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 […]