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

Amy Jane Parker

plastic, petroleum, faecal matter of antarctic krill, carbon, symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast, inkjet print, moth, water, glazed earthenware

Amy Jane Parker is an artist, artist facilitator and disability support worker based in Naarm/Melbourne.

Jazz Money

mardi gras rainbow dreaming

༼ つ ✿◕‿◕✿༽つ (‿ˠ‿) the BWS is now a BWyaasssssS as in yass queen as in yasssss gay pride as in yass we co-opted this lingo from black queer communities on the other side of the world as in BeerWineSpirits is now a place to drink down some black queer liberation on land stolen that […]

Kenzee Patterson

Exhausted Painting: Brilliant Red, Ultramarine, Phthalo Green

Kenzee Patterson is a settler-colonial descendant whose art practice combines material experimentation with historical research, autobiography and language, motivated by the imperative to confront the ecological and socio-cultural repercussions of resource extraction and material displacement.

Danni McGrath

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I study Marx on company time

Contemporary art is kind of a pyramid scheme: the few artists who make a living making art in this speculative market obscure the vast majority who must do all kinds of other work to pay for food, rent and the art practice itself. I say this not to create an us-versus-them situation between more and […]

Stephen Palmer

Art in Crisis: Resilience, Recovery, Reproduction

With the implementation of lockdowns and social distancing measures last year we witnessed an almost overnight closure of a large part of the Australian arts sector, prompting a widespread call for financial support. These calls for assistance often took a well-trodden road, emphasising the significant contribution that the sector makes to the national economy, as […]

Lucreccia Quintanilla

Night

Lucreccia Quintanilla is an artist, writer, DJ and researcher gratefully living and working on the unceded lands of the Boon Wurrung and Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) peoples of the Kulin Nation. Her practice is both an individual and collaborative one which manifests into outcomes within galleries and also as events and performances outside of that context. Her […]

Bonnie Reid

Worker Bee, Hawk-Eye, Drone

If attention was an experiment in living, rather than a deal or a calculation. —Adam Phillips I looked up from the breakfast table to the highest window in the apartment. There, silently, a plane made its way from the left jamb to the right and was gone. It was the first I’d seen flying in […]

Jessie Bullivant

Dear E

Dear E, I read in an article that the letter ‘E’ is what you preferred to be known as towards the end of your life.[^1] I’m accepting this, as I cannot ask you or seek your consent. It’s 2020. I am writing about your famed decision to boycott women in 1971, and a selection of […]

Snack Syndicate

Bread and Roses

The desire for a disalienated life-world — as envisioned in the slogan bread and roses — is if nothing else the demand for everyone to enjoy the kinds of aesthetic contingency that capital cordons off for the wealthy. Kay Gabriel I write to you but in public; my description of you exceeds our relation. It […]

Hannah Wu

Notes on Sediment

To recall is to mine. Language that is used to describe memory may refer to a geological excavation, a process of extracting from the past.[^1] Dig through densely sedimented layers of events, unbury the precious minerals of history. But the past is not constituted by solid ground, does not consist of absolute occurrences. We have […]

Elena Gomez and Rosie Isaac

In Conversation with Fiona Foley

un Magazine: Could you tell us a bit about your country? Fiona Foley: I was born on my Country, which is Maryborough. We have two tracks of land. We have six islands and one of those islands is Fraser Island, also known as K’gari — it’s the largest sand island in the world. On the […]

Amrita Hepi

A Glossary of Movement

ANTI/ANTE DANCER : (noun) A dancer who is preoccupied not with the expressive notion of dance, but with the possibilities, communities, kinships and images that emerge from the pursuit of pleasure and rigour through dancing. ‘AUTHENTICITY’ : (noun) A dilemma to be inspected, in dance as much as in handbags. The anti-dancer moves towards the […]

Brian Obiri-Asare

Exiled Out There, Inside the Margins, Together

If they don’t see the joy in the film at least they’ll see the black Take My Hand, Let’s Dwell In This Space A pair of Black filmmakers. They’ve always been outsiders. At odds with the psychosis of whiteness, their lived experience has always been one of rootlessness and existential absurdity. One of being a […]

Jinghua Qian

I Can’t Apply for Another Grant

My friends keep sending me grants and opportunities. I appreciate it, I really do. It’s nice to know that people are thinking of me. But I never want to apply for a grant again. I can’t. My body recoils. It feels like taking my skin off for nothing. We’ve all been talking a lot this […]

Hana Pera Aoake and Morgan Godfery

Land Back: On Language, Bodies and ‘Cheaty’ Settlements

Whatungarongaro te tangata toituu te whenua (As man disappears from sight, the land remains) Indigenous struggles against capitalism and imperialism are often struggles orientated around land. As Maaori, we base our rela- tionship with land on reciprocity, physically and ethically com- mitting ourselves to land through a just and sustainable give and take. We even […]

Tristen Harwood and Wally Wilfred

Dhyakiyarr vs The King (2018)

Dhyakiyarr vs The King Wally Wilfred’s sculpture Dhyakiyarr vs The King delves into the story of Dhakiyarr, a respected Balamumu leader from north-east Arnhem Land. In 1932, five Japanese and two white trepangers were speared at Woodah Island in Blue Mud Bay. The fishermen had violated territorial rights, threatened local people with guns and raped […]

Tristen Harwood and Wally Wilfred

After the rescue (2020)

In 1911, during the wet season, Northern Territory police officer Constable Johns arrested Ayaiga, also known as ‘Neighbour’ and three other Aboriginal men accused of robbing a white man’s hut. Johns shackled the four prisoners and they began the 32-kilometre journey to Roper Bar Police Station on foot, escorted by Johns on horseback. Arriving at […]

Timmah Ball

Blueprint for Another World

By definition, there is no master sketch for what such a thing might look like. It can only be an experiment. — Maggie Nelson Section 1: A Portrait of the Writer as a Failed Urbanist In Carceral Capitalism, Jackie Wang stares into an abyss of hopelessness, acutely aware that prison abolition is as implausible as […]

Carly Stone and Lujayn Hourani

Speaking of Positionality, Your Body is a Little Off Centre

When I leave Lujayn’s room and I turn off the light, I turn off the dark as well. The paradox of form and void is that each exists by virtue of the other’s appearance and also by virtue of the other’s disappearance. The dark exists because there is light; this is obvious. You turn on […]

Jung Sujin

Folding the Monument

Alongside the Black Lives Matter movement, the anti- monument movement has been growing. In Bristol in the United Kingdom, a statue of slave trader Edward Colston was dragged down and dumped in the river; in the United States, ‘statues of Christopher Columbus have been beheaded.’[^1] In Australia, although colonial statues have largely avoided destruction thus […]

Khalid Warsame

Tracing Transcendence

Franz Kafka’s short story ‘The City Coat of Arms’ (1931), begins with a group of people who all agree that it would be a great idea to build a tower. ‘At first all the arrangements for building the Tower of Babel were characterized by fairly good order … perhaps too perfect.’ Arrangements are made for […]

Cameron Hurst, Babs Rapeport and Dominique Tang

Putting Art to Workers

It is not kind to laugh at other people’s art. Seated on a grass lawn a few blocks away from Fringe Festival’s new home in Trades Hall, the three of us shared a moment of comedy thinking about the radical potentialities which might emerge as moustache twiddlers collide with staunch trade union militants. Connecting the […]

Sam Petersen

WHY I WRITE SO LITTLE (My limited access to the print world)

This will take a lot out of me. But it has to be said. My dyslexia is my third disability. I used to think I was lazy; my reading and writing could improve if only I applied myself. But I found it all so hard. Mum would say you need to learn to read because […]

Rayleen Forester

Aida Azin: An Exploration of Mother-Tongue Language

This must be the taste of Language — the tongue mapped by many colours, parsed by the vowels of memory, the roof of the mouth the dome of a world circumscribed by consonants, whose edges suggest the sour-sweetness of oranges, the bittermelon’s green rind, the river- scent of mangoes all the way to the grove. […]

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