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 […]
do you need some hope? a friend told me I need a taser. fear and violence. I felt no one would talk to me. having no one to share your achievements with everytime that you create a new world. I’m sorry I care about you. I’m afraid to ask for more of your time. I […]
To walk through the main roads, small alleys, places or neighbourhoods that a mass protest has touched is to negotiate tilted grounds. What used to be the flatness of the everyday — double-deckers’ squeaky engines, fences and traffic lights managing anonymous bodies, endless lines of advertisements — now acquires a different shape. Protest sites of […]
A woman in light blue jeans kneels over a sex doll. Its synthetic, rubbery legs are splayed across a bed as she casually probes its mouth with her fingers. A moment later she fields an enquiry on a cordless phone. ‘We usually go by appointments,’ she politely states in German, as she adjusts the doll’s […]
Unknown barely survived a massacre that decimated her people. Sometime around the mid-1800s, hidden beneath shrub, she watched as vicious intruders collected her clan’s lives, one by one, until no soul stood. As silence fell, she travelled through grass picking up her feet faster and faster, until she hit a heavy speed, fast enough to […]
We move together, with no body left behind —Sins Invalid When you’re non-disabled, a comfortable place to sit down is not something that you spend much time worrying about. You probably wouldn’t even think about it until you needed it and it wasn’t there. Living with my disabilities (which include arthritis), a place to sit […]
In Octavia Butler’s science-fiction novel Parable of the Sower a character remarks: ‘There has to be more that we can do, a better destiny that we can shape. Another place. Another way. Something!’[^1] This plea is rooted in a near-future dystopian Los Angeles, an irritating and disfigured city that has been destroyed by climate change […]
The following text is developed from a body of research originally produced as part of The Combative Phase, an exhibition of films and documents and a series of programs held at Yale Union (Portland, US) in 2017. Left to themselves, large communities do a dreadful job of communicating internally. Ghettoes, whether in Bel Air or […]
The words below form multiple threads of preliminary thoughts shared between Joel Sherwood-Spring and Carol Que from December 2018 to August 2019. Both young academics tenuously located between the institution and their creative and political work ‘outside’, the conversation here spans lands, architectures, gentrification, and education. Joel’s words are indented and Carol’s are left aligned.[^1] […]
Artlaab was a University of Western Australia (UWA) School of Design student-run gallery in the Nedlands Masonic Hall. For many of us, Artlaab was the site of early experiments in curation, installation, studio practice and performance. As a past facilitator of Artlaab, I have written this essay to question how its institutional conditions led to […]
Who said it? is a tweeted intervention drawing attention to how the language of the contemporary University is little different to the language of corporate marketing. Pivoting off the imperative that the University must ‘take its place’ in a marketised world, I tweet copy from University promotional material alongside that of merchant banks, real estate […]
Kym Maxwell is an artist and educator residing in the Kulin Nation of Naarm (Melbourne).
This document addresses the relationship between Australian Indigenous Studies (AIS) andThe University of Melbourne. The way The University of Melbourne exerts power over marginalised communities, and their epistemologies, will be familiar to anyone who has gone through similar treatment in the academy. It is exerted through physical and disciplinary fragmentation of offices and departments, through […]
Samoa House Library was created in response to The University of Auckland’s decision to close three specialist libraries: Fine Arts, Music and Dance, Architecture and Urban Planning. As members of ‘Save the Fine Arts Library’ campaign, we organised to raise public awareness of the decision and to halt the closures. While our campaign was successful […]
Whenever we establish our spaces, specifically for us, those spaces are inherently seen as threats.[^1] Joseph Cullier, cofounder of The Black School In his address to the 2018 Distinguished Alumni Awards Dinner for the University of Auckland, Fijian Pākehā artist Luke Willis Thompson described receiving his first undergraduate scholarship as ‘a moment of mobility … […]
Twenty First Century Naked Apes: Handaxes and the Genesis of the Mental World I wake up and do my compulsive morning scroll: an activist friend’s picture of stolen land; a witty defeatist environmental meme; dazzling selfie after selfie with unrelated captions. One of them is mine. A new club night! Fucking hell. It’s nearly 2020, […]
UCLA. Broad Art Centre. Classroom 2122. Great Expectations. A bildungsroman novel by Charles Dickens. The narrator: Pip. A retrospective narrator for a recursive structure. Recounting, with hindsight, the story of the young boy he once was. Two Pips per page, often more. For instance: older Pip remembering younger Pip thinking about his future. Identity formation […]