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 […]

identity politics One of the most important things that identity politics has taught us is that the distinction between being and doing is fraught. To think you have to perform an action. To perform an action you have to discard frivolity and set yourself on solid ground. Discourses of violence are inextricable from the subjects […]

I am selfish and so is everyone else under capitalism who can afford an iPhone. Men like to talk about surveillance as if it is the state. Women take photos of themselves. A famous woman selling herself is the archetype of us all. Selfish, Kim Kardashian West’s book of selfies taken over her lifetime, induces […]

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 […]

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 […]