un Projects is based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation; we pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.
un Projects

Leon Goh

Mis-Design

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 […]

Dylan Rainforth

Slave Pianos / Punkasila / Pipeline to Oblivion

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 […]

David Homewood

Exhuming the Archive: Interview with Rossella Biscotti

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 […]

Andrew Atchison

Do Leave me This Way … Keith Haring’s Difficult Presence in Collingwood

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, […]

Sven Knudsen

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: Aliens on Australia’s Doorstep

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 […]

Baptist Place: Three Responses

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 […]

Rebecca Conroy

We Are Here. But who are we, really?

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 […]

Hugh Nichols

Within & Without

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 […]

Adrien Allen, Hélène Frichot & Bridie Lunney

Suspension Test for Three Voices

A collaborative text between Adrien Allen (director of Conical, Inc., Melbourne), Dr Hélène Frichot (senior lecturer, Program of Architecture, RMIT University) and Bridie Lunney (artist). Lunney’s exhibition Suspension Test at Conical in March 2011 engaged Frichot’s text and Allen’s space. Interleaving these three voices together expands an account of the work, while acknowledging its inseparability […]

Trent Walter

A Conversation with Simon Maidment, Director of Satellite Art Projects

Simon Maidment is the director of Satellite Art Projects, a not-for-profit arts organisation focused on presenting ambitious public projects outside of the gallery context. Working across platforms, Satellite’s projects and commissions involve collaboration between artists and other specialists — including architects, engineers and designers — to realise engaging site-specific public artworks. Trent Walter : What […]

Liang Luscombe

Walking is not a Medium, it’s an Attitude

Walking is not a medium, it’s an attitude. To walk is a very immediate and handy way of interacting and eventually interfering within a given context.[^1] — Francis Alÿs The practice of walking as a leisurely activity and not simply as an unavoidable mode of mobility and convenience is one that many of us take […]

Kyle Weise

Footscrayism

Barkly Arts Centre, Footscray, Melbourne 3 June – 1 July 2011 Curated by Jessica Scott, artist-in-residence Footscrayism was one of three exhibitions produced as part of New Skin, a key outcome of the artist-in-residence program at Footscray’s Barkly Arts Centre, which required each artist-in-residence to utilise community involvement in their individual projects. Untangling Footscrayism from […]

Jason Workman

Architecture on the Fringes of Legality: Santiago Cirugeda & Kyohei Sakaguchi

A dwelling is extracted from the fine print of planning and building codes. A modest architectural prosthesis, connected physically and psychically to four apartments. Here the architect rests, calibrates acts in which to reconfigure the city’s code. In another location, across an ocean, a handful of portable structures stand, blue tarpaulins taut. A small village […]

Tim Hillier

Hammer Time: Transcending Geography

In March of this year at Rear View Gallery, Melbourne, and Artbank, Vancouver, Kate Moss and Marilyne Blais simultaneously constructed transient and temporal structures through the use of found materials, Skype, projectors and volunteers. We Build Up became a communal structure that was both a mirror of itself and a quixotic attempt to join architectural […]

Alicia Frankovich

Writing Sculptures

Kel Glaister (b. Melbourne 1984) is currently in Europe following an Australia Council Residency in Paris at the Cité International in 2010 and is currently on a residency at the 17th International Studio Program of the ACC Galerie Weimar and the City of Weimar. Glaister has been working with sculpture in recent years and this […]

Jeanne Randolph

Ficto-Facto Acto — Dicta Depiction

If a work of art was a woman’s body, could psychoanalytic theory serve as her girdle? A gal such as myself never overlooks an opportunity to exploit mundane activities for their metaphors, and I was definitely washing underwear when I realised I could write ficto-criticism. It was 1983 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and I was […]

Aneta Trajkoski

‘You’ll see banal and dramatic landscapes; by the end you won’t know which is which’ —The Centre For Land Use Interpretation

The rationality of a grid on a map sinks into what it is supposed to define… One is liable to see things in maps that are not there. One must be careful of the hypothetical monsters that lurk between the map’s latitudes…[^1] What is legitimacy? What is it that makes a person, a group or […]

Patrice Sharkey

Another Yummy Fantasy II

TCB art inc., Melbourne, 2–19 February 2011, organised by Kate Smith and Alex Vivian Sculpture is an elastic and accommodating art form. When Gilbert & George, coated in metallic make-up, stood on a table and moved robotically to the music hall hit ‘Underneath the Arches’ in 1970, they invoked the medium by naming the performance […]

Eleanor Weber

The Way It Wasn’t (Celebrating Ten Years of Castillo/Corrales, Paris)

Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis 20 November 2010 – 15 January 2011 Culturgest, Porto, 5 February – 23 April 2011 If I’m going to be completely honest with you, I have never been to Minneapolis nor [sic] Porto so I too have never ‘seen’ the show. — email to the editor, 22 April 2011 ‘Completely honest’, […]

Eamon Sprod

Bogong Air: Festival of Site Specific Sound Art

A West Space off-site project, Bogong Alpine Village, Victoria, 19–20 February 2011 organised by Philip Samartzis and Madelynne ‘Site specific’ is a term that, through over- and inappropriate use, tends to become slightly meaningless; much like the term ‘sound art’. Nevertheless, site specificity has come to play a large and ever increasing role within contemporary […]

Amelia Stein

Bababa International and The Very Serious Business of Making Money

Like so many insidious and powerful organisations before them, Bababa International (BI) prefer to remain undefined. At present, its six members are nameless and the collective will only agree publicly on their location (Bababa International Airport, Redfern) and their commitment to making and exhibiting art under the BI designation. Perhaps it is this indifference to […]

Glenn Walls

Les Mason: Epicurean Magazine 1966–1979

The Narrows, Melbourne, 30 September – 14 November 2010 Curated by Dominic Hofstede

Stephen Palmer

One and Three Texts

In the 1960s, Joseph Kosuth claimed that conceptual art would usurp the place of a number of other writing-based practices, such as literature and philosophy. It is now widely known that this bold claim was connected to his idea that the task of contemporary art had become to question and expand the definition of art […]

Tim Alves

Extreme Beauty: Approaches to the Real

Y3K, Melbourne, 4–24 December 2010, curated by Kate Briggs Finding is the first Act The second, loss, Third, Expedition for The ‘Golden Fleece’ Fourth, no Discovery — Fifth, no Crew — Finally, no Golden Fleece — Jason — sham — too.[^1] Extreme Beauty: Approaches to the Real followed the threads of the classic stories of […]

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