Shelley McSpedden & Meredith Turnbull : Russian Constructivist theorist, Boris Arvatov, promoted the potential of ‘things’ to act as dynamic agents for social and political change. Does such a model of objects have relevance to the work that you do? Tahjee Moar : Boris Arvatov’s notion of ‘co-worker’ and the potential of ‘things’ to act […]
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 […]
Consider the out-of-focus faces in the background of a crowd scene. Outnumbering the key players twenty to one, they go unseen and unannounced. What would it mean to adjust the depth of field and throw the background actors into sharp relief? My line of inquiry is concerned with the possibility of using inconspicuousness as a […]
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 […]