Gertrude Contemporary Art Space’s walled-up front window feels like a rebuff to my bad habit. When the traffic is quiet I sometimes idle my engine, forget the road and superficially consume the front space like a teenager cruising down Chapel Street on a Saturday night. I admit my drive-by window-shopping is not qualitatively dissimilar to browsing […]

This year’s annual Kinetica Art Fair, hosted by the Kinetica Museum in London, attempted a balanced representation of analogue and digital art practices. In this way, the 2012 event marked a break with Kinetica Art Fairs of years past, which have traditionally privileged the display of digital media. For Kinetica Art Fair 2012, ‘kinetic art’ was […]

Once upon a time, Perth’s most ambitious graduates went travelling and then moved east, returning home once a year to see family and friends. In 2012, relocating to Melbourne is still their preferred ‘next step’, but in recent times their visits home have become more frequent.[^1] The vitality of the artist‐run scene in Perth, together […]

As I ponder how Scott Mitchell’s way of being in the world might be positioned or discussed in relation to broader frameworks of art and design, it becomes increasingly apparent that this distinction is an afterthought.[^1] He privileges neither art nor design, as such inhabiting a space where both modes of practice might in some […]

edited by: Chris Kraus Chris Kraus is a Los Angeles-based author and critic, founding editor of Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents imprint and onetime filmmaker in the New York downtown scene of the mid-eighties. Her novels — part-fiction, part-memoir and part-philosophy — include I Love Dick, Aliens and Anorexia and Torpor. Kraus has written three books of […]

Isabelle Graw is a Berlin-based art critic and author of High Price: Art between the market and celebrity culture, published in 2009 by Strenberg Press. She is the co-founder of art journal Texte zur Kunst in Berlin and professor at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule). Liang Luscombe — What were the circumstances and motivations […]

Having pedaled across the Yarra one Saturday morning in October 2011, I found my friend amongst a cluster of people waiting in the foyer of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. A few weeks prior, Julie had forwarded me an email invite to an art field trip to ‘investigate the influence of Australian farmer Percival Alfred […]

Like all productive collaborations, Open Archive is a discussion — a swirling, organic (a word used many times during our conversations), epistemic questioning, where utterances may stall and waver, and ideas are picked up later, the formation of ideas denying a definitive full stop. Jared Davis and Helen Grogan share an interest in performance, so […]

In an otherwise straightforward ­discussion of her curatorial practice, what stood out in Ute Meta Bauer’s presentation at the State Library of Victoria in March, was an improvised series of comments on the state of contemporary art.[^1] These comments followed a line of thought evident in a series of articles in e-flux journal published in […]

I’ve learnt that it’s dangerous to mention I spent the first twenty-something years of my life living in ‘The Emerald City’, for it invariably leads to the question that seems to fascinate Melburnians of all ages, races, genders and creeds: ‘how do the cities compare?’ An innocent enough question, perhaps, but it is typically asked with […]

Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells, 2010–2011 Various libraries: Buenos Aires, Berlin, London, Warsaw, Stockholm, Copenhagen. No-one comes to a library to stay there.[^1] — Ant Hampton English artists Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells collaborated for the first time on The Quiet Volume, in which they explore the social and imaginative space created within a library. […]

Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 10 June – 16 July 2011 Curated by Amita Kirpalani At the end of the exhibition Catching Trucks, a brief film clip played on a small screen located next to the reception desk. The scene was from Agnès Varda’s 2000 film The Gleaners and I which investigates contemporary gleaners; the people who […]

Elizabeth Newman & Nicki Wynnychuk Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide 19 May – 18 June 2011 Art that looks like furniture, and furnishings that look like art, and polychromes that look like monochromes, but only because the lighting’s too low, and monochromes that look polychromatic, but only because you’re standing too close. This is a […]

The work creates a space. Work makes its own dimensions. The body finds the most comfortable way of rearticulating its movements and repeating its techniques, edging outwards and converging inwards, marking out a perimeter within which all tools are at easy reach, and all the while remaining focused on the work. The work creates a […]

La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre, Bendigo June 16 – July 24, 2011 Curated by Caroline Phillips Interior Architecture brought together eight very different artists who employed a range of processes and materials in their exploration of the body in space. What was refreshing about this exhibition was the fact that architecture was examined in […]

‘Work for life and not for palaces, temples, cemeteries, and museums’, wrote Aleksandr Rodchenko. His thought is profound but how does it play out? David Harris (aka DJ Toecutter) and Phoebe Torzillo built a yurt and lived in it for a year. Upon learning this fact, I had the hypothesis that their decision was most […]

Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and multiple off-site venues 24 August 2011 to 6 November 2011 Curated by Grace McQuilten Mis-Design was an expansive, multi-layered project with exhibitions occupying the Ian Potter Museum of Art as well as off-site venues such as the McDonald’s car park, Collingwood, and the Alphaville clothing store […]

Three projects by Danius Kesminas and collaborators Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 5 May – 23 July 2011 Curated by Max Delany Visually, Danius Kesminas’s three projects included in Monash University Museum of Art’s survey show — covering his work with a varied cast of collaborators over the last decade — defied viewers to […]

Rossella Biscotti is an Italian-born artist currently based in Amsterdam whose work reconsiders or revives histories that have been ‘swept under the carpet’; often censored by authorities interested in preserving an official public memory of a figure, event or period. In the following interview I ask Biscotti about her recent work focused on the infamous […]

The popping curves, motion lines and electric colour scheme of Keith Haring’s (1958–1990) Untitled mural of 1984 evoke vitality and energy. But things change. Today the mural, situated at the former Collingwood Technical College, is faded and peeling in parts. Its appearance speaks of time passed by way of a surface textured with absence and, […]

In 2012 the Aboriginal Tent Embassy will commemorate forty years of Indigenous political activism at its Canberra site. Set on the front lawn of what is now Old Parliament House (OPH) and surrounded by monolithic buildings, such as the High Court of Australia, Treasury offices, National Gallery of Australia and National Library of Australia, the […]

Time: Saturday morning, 20 August 2011 Place: Baptist Place, Melbourne Directions: Southern side of Little Collins Street, between Swanston and Russell The Urban Designer Hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs protruding here and there, smart edges running along it and subsiding again, with clear notes splintering off and […]

We Are Here (WAH) was an international symposium for artist-run initiatives, developed by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), in collaboration with Firstdraft. It was funded by the Australia Council for the Arts, ArtsNSW, the Copyright Agency Ltd, the City of Sydney and the Freedman Foundation. Held in Sydney from September 1–4 in […]

Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney Produced in collaboration with Performance Space, Sydney 23 June – 2 July 2011 Within & Without was a portrait of Manila. A hybrid theatre work set in a scaled-down replica of the city made from recycled cardboard boxes, it saw a sprawling and chaotic metropolis transplanted into Blacktown Arts Centre in […]