A contemplation on the alphabet of a not-so-distant future: The found debris revealed that the written word was once considered to be a form of digital code. (data). It existed inside and outside of the computer as a made-up system of discrete differentiable units. When assembled in certain ways, the meaning of alphabetic sequences could […]
To continue, to pick up where something was left off. The prefix ‘re-’ descends from a root meaning ‘turn’ — the return is a doubling, a sitting within the previously inhabited material presence that was left and come back to. Ekphrasis enacts a close reading of an artwork through text, the formation of a double […]
Within the hallowed halls of galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM), Indigenous voices echo with stories that transcend time and space. As an Indigenous person, working within these spaces is a profound exploration into unravelling the remnants of colonial legacies, rediscovering Indigenous perspectives and championing a way to understand our now shared histories. As an […]
Remember how we were a liberation army of two? How this two was framed by a third who ensured our brattishness didn’t _______ even ourselves? How ____ framed that burning year as a performance that could have so easily been another Burning Man fiasco, and that _____ our overinvested will to immolation. That beauty belongs […]
In the nineteenth century, French philosopher Victor Cousins seeded the idea of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake)[1], a phrase that has echoed into contemporary neo-liberal discourse to negate the need to consider politics in art encounters. However, for bodies that exist within any intersection of marginalisation and oppression, there is an understanding that […]
Walking along refinery drive down the harbourside I find three balls of steel corroded with rust, sweat and sugar. Monumental minor time dial turn anti-ode as antidote to a century and a half ago. Fiona pulls into the harbour carrying her precious cargo hand cultivated raw cane sugar precarious bodies, their coloured labour. Machines refine […]
the following is an excerpt of a poem responding to BIOGRAPHICALITY (2023) curated by Dominic Eichler at Efremidis, Berlin featuring Tony Just, Tamar Magradze, Anne Jud, Marita Liiten, Alex Müller, Xavier Robles de Medina and Stephanie Stein. This text responds to One Night Locked in S036 (1979) a portrait series and performance where Anne Jud […]
30 short, tentative steps. I came back by accident, took a peculiar shortcut, and found myself in a familiar hospital courtyard of bleached concrete. Infinite rows of windows peer down from a sandy brick façade; a stern assembly of quiet observers. Pungent bile rises in my stomach. Waves of nausea descend and my vision becomes […]
Ruby, you are sitting in front of me. I see you. I see you physically. But how do you actually want me to see you? How do you describe yourself to the world today? Within the artistic world, I often found that being my mother’s daughter came with a lot of expectations. It took many […]
INT. EVANGELINE’S BEDROOM. NIGHT. EVANGELINE (mid-20s), dressed from the neck down in her fursona — a Pink Husky Dog Fursuit in Shibari bondage — paces around her room. She sits at her desk and stares into the glowing ring light affixed to her phone, which stands ready to record. In the background, the documentary All […]
In 2019, Jack Mitchell of Black White and Bluespace and Eliki Reade of New Wayfinders collaborated on Resistance Transmission — ten days of deep listening events on Boon Wurrung Country that aimed to deepen the audience’s relationship with the Maribyrnong river through storytelling, song, poetry and yarning, or talanoa. Held within the Due West Arts […]
What if we made the skilled labour of listening, building relationships, and ongoing maintenance more visible in public pedagogy and socially negotiated art?1 What if we understood such work as forms of caretaking while actively resisting the enabling of broken systems? Community engaged arts work has come under scrutiny for its often misguided ‘good intentions’ […]
Paint pours through a system. Run of the mill white emulsion runs through pipes into canvas, fills canvas, pours out, through a series of neatly cut holes, runs down, is caught, fed into pump, fed into pipes, into canvas, through and round. Natasha Kidd’s Flow and Return (2006) is a cyclical loop of white paint […]
I didn’t notice that his fly was down at first. I thought maybe he was a bit out of it as he leaned on the front window to support himself. I peered at his face from the other side of the glass. He looked serene, beatific even, with a soft, gentle grin on his face. […]
A speculation on speculation, this nonlinear conversation addresses processes of working. It allows for a thematic meander that we hope you can join us on, one perhaps for all the tangential thinkers … Previously, we have moved through moments in sound guided by Assia Djebar’s words on ‘Aphasia,’ ‘Murmur,’ ‘Voice,’ ‘Clamour’ and ‘Whisper’ in Fantasia: […]
Late last year I went up to Bendigo for the launch of Chunxiao Qu’s poetry book at the La Trobe Art Institute. My partner and I decided to stay overnight because we had heard about a huge population of bats that live in a park there and we also wanted to check out a few […]
January 20, 2023Whadjuk Noongar Boodja As an artist, I have a deep and profound respect and reverence for art. The drive to communicate the joys, tragedies and bewilderment of the human experience by creating beautiful things is core to who we are as a species. It must be protected at all costs.It’s what makes life […]
In October 2022, I found myself in India working alongside Gumbaynggirr artist and friend, Aretha Brown. Aretha was commissioned by the Australian High Commission in New Delhi, to create a 122 metre mural, running along the chancery’s perimeter. Hailing from the Gumbaynggirr peoples and language group, the mural’s title, Girrwaawa, translates to ‘come together.’ A […]
In the whenua (land), the art collective Kauae Raro see the potentiality for its use as art material and as cultural and spiritual mediums. Through a broad expanse of experiments more can be uncovered about the state of Te Taiao (the natural world) and how Māori engage with the world around us. Founded in 2019 […]
While most people in the world can understand speech in more than one language, the bilingual speaker is considered exceptional in so-called Australia. I am, to my own dismay, a statistically-average-by-Australian-standards monolingual anglophone despite having two multilingual parents. I write this article in the nascency of my Cantonese learning. Although it is my mother’s lineage, […]
We started HEAVY DUTY in the second half of 2020. The world was in a constant state of clash, but fortunately for us in Boorloo our geographic isolation allowed for a relative sense of ease. People previously living abroad were returning to the safety of the Boorloo dome, bringing with them stories of Covid-19 from […]
Thinking back to my first visit to However Vast the Darkness atJohn Curtin Gallery in March, I now remember that moment as being unusually bookended by the subject of death. In the months prior to seeing the exhibition, death seemed to be a recurring theme in my life; a sequence that I can only describe […]
So far the 2020s have been the decade of the ‘water’ and‘decolonial’ biennial. Everyone’s doing it — bringing togetherIndigenous and non-white artists against the loose themes of‘flows of resistance’ or the like, attempting to make sense in amoment of intersecting and layered crises. Questions aroundinstitutional transformation, curatorial activism, representation,the environment, climate change, equality, and how […]