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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance. —John Berger Compared to humans, other animals seem quite reasonable. —Claude Cahun As I write, Clare and her son Morten, or ‘Greenface Group’, are drawing a chicken watching a spider eating a cockroach; a war of magic between a lizard and […]

PREAMBLE This text is a treatment for an audio essay, a study in be-holding Sans II (1968), a sculptural work by Eva Hesse in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). To be-hold, as I have written elsewhere, reclaims the etymological root of ‘beholding’, before the term’s co-option as ocular observance. […]

My Grandma Hanna made the wallet I carry with me every day. It’s tanned caribou hide, trimmed with small green and white glass beads, a perfect five-petal flower — dark green, iridescent orange, with a light-pink centre. It’s sitting next to me as I write this from Lenapeyok homeland, Lenapehoking. I carry my grandma’s gorgeous […]

1. ‘How do we reconnect with the gestural origins of language?’ asks Jackie Wang. I wanted to write about the failure of language and I wanted to write about how the failure of language is an enduring matter of culture, an enduring matter of the project of poetics. The process of writing can be quite […]

three caravans out the back fridge under the house floodwater been coming up two bedroom fibro boat tied to the side five kids moving all their stuff up a big boiler for washing caravans going somewhere else sans occupants and there were a dozen occupants the days before climate catastrophe was a well-worn concept we […]

I was sprinting when I first heard Hannah Weiner’s voice. I’d developed a habit of running along the Merri Creek and, instead of listening to music, I would listen to audio recordings of poets reading and talking. I’d picked the recording almost at random from the PennSound archive, having never read her work before. It […]

A shift towards advocating for full representation within the arts sector has encouraged an increase in programming across artist-run and institutional spaces that supports and prioritises culturally diverse artists. However, there is still a need to address the underrepresentation of curators from a variety of backgrounds employed within these cultural organisations. If the curator’s etymological […]

This essay narrates the direction of contemporary art practices in post-1998 Indonesia through a discussion about care, viability of artists’ projects — using Parasite Lottery, Gudskul and Serikat Sindikasi as case studies — and the sustainability of cultural ecosystems. It provides historical accounts of how these initiatives emerged in contemporary Indonesia, and the ways that […]