On 5 January 2019, members of the far-right gathered on the boardwalk of St Kilda Beach to ‘Reclaim the Beach’. Organised by known fascists Blair Cottrell and Neil Erikson, the ‘Reclaim the Beach’ rally claimed to be a response to recent incidents of mugging involving African young people in the Port Phillip Bay area. Attendees […]

‘Hey Muhammad, guess what time it is?’ The sound of multiple mobile phone alarms fill the room. It is first period and my eldest son is sitting in his Year 12 English class. As the only Muslim, he finds himself at the centre of a persistent morning ritual. His classmates have their alarms set to […]

The white glove hovered momentarily over the ‘buy now’ button. One click away from souveniring a memento that might help it all click into place. The item in question: a pre-2001 Twin Tower snow dome, complete with an inauthentic looking Certificate of Authenticity. Once purchased it would make its way to my cache of accumulated […]

I studied in the original coloniser country, the United Kingdom. While I was there, I visited a lot of museums with stolen art and cultural objects. The first time I visited the British Museum I was overcome with rage and sadness. Back then, I was surprised at my strong reactions to material objects not from […]

The true believers are the ones who have faith in God and his Messenger and leave all doubt behind. The ones who have struggled with their possessions and their persons in Gods way: they are the ones who are true. Qur’an 49:15 The verse above belongs to a Qur’anic surah. It instructs believers on how […]

The white glove hovered momentarily over the ‘buy now’ button. One click away from souveniring a memento that might help it all click into place. The item in question: a pre-2001 Twin Tower snow dome, complete with an inauthentic looking Certificate of Authenticity. Once purchased it would make its way to my cache of accumulated […]

The disassembly of a skyscraper is a rare and expensive event. Counter-construction, or reverse building, methods precede often baroque permit requests and legal go aheads. In a sense, a building must be ‘re-cocooned’ in the very materials from which it sprung forth. Scaffolding is wrapped along the perimeter and façade of a structure destined for […]

In 2017, the City of Melbourne installed 190 public address speakers at ninety-five locations around the CBD. The speaker system quickly became known in the media as the city’s ‘terror sirens’. They were installed to counter the spectre of a mass incident, or a ‘class 3 emergency’—a siege, riot, shooting or vehicle attack. When signalling […]

Bah, I make circumstances!— Napoleon Our progress poisons the sources of our experience. And the poison tastes so sweet that it spoils our appetite for plain fact.— Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America, 1962 The first American newspaper was published once a month in 1690, because there were only […]

The cartoon is a type of visual shorthand that says a lot about how we view ourselves and others. From one-off newspaper images to serialised comics, cartoons supply a pictorial genealogy of racist tropes that began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and persist to the present day. Cartoons create meaning through the manipulation of […]

I’m just a singer of simple songs, I’m not a real political man. I watch CNN, but I’m not sure I can tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran. Alan Jackson, ‘Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)’ When kitsch aesthetics and moral conventions converge, we observe the emergence of kitsch ethics. This […]

Apparently a dog saved Robert Nixon’s political career, transforming him from swindling politician to sympathetic family man with a single strategically-timed intervention. This was in September 1952 and Nixon had just been accused of receiving illegal campaign contributions by his running mate, the Republican nominee Dwight Eisenhower.[^1] In a nationally broadcast television appearance Nixon pleaded […]

Prior to the most recent performance (or performative exchange) of Illusions of Self Motion at the National Gallery of Victoria in June 2018, Brook Andrew asked trawulwuy art historian Dr Greg Lehman, myself and current performance collaborator Ben Opie to discuss the connections between Illusions on Self Motion with Brook’s own work 52 Portraits and […]

Diana Baker-Smith : When I think about collaboration, I think about friendship. I think about our first collaborations at art school well over a decade ago, when we used to do performances in clubs and at warehouse parties. I think about conversations over kitchen tables, sharing beds in regional towns and handmade birthday cards. Making […]

In May 2018, New South Wales-based duo Make or Break (Rebecca Gallo and Connie Anthes) presented their site-specific performance work Unveilings at Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial. This conversation began then, and continued over email. Hey Anna, : When I think of public monuments I picture a white male figure cast in bronze atop a granite […]

Critical Dias : How do we start? Maybe we can talk about the last two years, in all of our lives! In the book Reinscriptions (2017) that we’ve just published, there are two main texts that we’ve been writing over the past two years, when concerns about machine learning and algorithmic tech and data have […]

Let’s get it on : My ‘straight’ (what even is ‘straight’? Who even is ‘straight’?) housemate made a bewildering comment on the way courting seems to work in my (queer art) world. ‘It’s very European. Very intellectual.’ I suppose you could see it as pretentious, or romantic, or pretentiously romantic, or romantically pretentious — exchanging […]

Embittered Swish is a performance art vehicle founded in 2016 whose first project was a trans adaptation and reformulation of Jean Genet’s 1943 novel Our Lady of the Flowers. Embittered Swish works across a fine art, theatre and club context and has shown work at Performance Space (PACT), Transgenre, La Mama Courthouse, firstdraft gallery, Australian […]

A new brain, a new way of thinking, a silicone mind fresh for moulding. Neural networks only know what they have been taught, a blank slate, a clean canvas. But they are so much more than just a surface or a new medium to explore; Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the future of art and offers […]

A few years ago I was interviewed with other trans artists by a cis white woman who makes self-reflexively queer art. When we were handed back the transcript, we saw that the word ‘trans’ — which we used with some flippancy in talking about our experiences of our bodies — had been appended with an […]

Marisa’s round table Annerley, Brisbane Amanda Hayman : This is the first time we’ve all been in the same room together, so I thought it would be good to start off with a little intro to the overarching project, Co-MMotion. Jenna Green : We established people+artist+place in 2017 because we wanted to see more live […]

Spring several years ago, fellow Canadian artist Lisa Visser and I embarked on a two-week road trip, driving 5,300 kms from Toronto across the United States to Los Angeles, during which time a collaborative project emerged. The purpose of this road trip was to move Lisa to California, so that she could carry out graduate […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about how survival is often linked to collectivity, specifically for people of colour, specifically for myself as a trans person of colour who owes so much of my survival to the collectives I’ve belonged to and the communities that have held me. I often think about what it means to […]

Curating a Pasifik space is unlike other art spaces. My mother taught me that if you pick a plant, treat it, dry it out and weave it into a mat it is still a living, breathing thing and it needs to be cared for. Mats need to be used, to be swept, sunned out if […]