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 […]

It occurs to me that the bookended timeline proposed between issues 13.1 and 13.2 of un Magazine – from the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001 (the historic location around which issue 13.1 was built), to the introduction of the ‘Melbourne Model’ in 2008 (the focus for 13.2) and beyond to our current conditions […]

Australian White Ibises are better known as bin chickens to most Sydney-siders. The nickname derives from the species reliance on rubbish and public bins to sustain themselves. Ibises are naturally inclined towards a diet of insects and molluscs, but with the loss of their wetland habitats to climate change and land redevelopments, they have been […]

We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around. We’re more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic. We surround democracy’s false image in order to unsettle it. Every time it tries to enclose us in a decision, we’re undecided. Every time it tries to represent our will, we’re unwilling. Every time it tries to take […]

Serene Velocity in Practice: MC510/ CS183* (2017-19) imagines two classrooms, each based on a real course taught by adjunct lecturers in United States’ tertiary education institutions. Evangelical pastor John Wimber taught ‘MC510: Signs and Wonders’ in the School of World Mission and Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary between 1982 and 1986. Silicon Valley entrepreneur […]

History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.[^1]— Michel-Rolph Trouillot On 11 September 1973 the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was deposed and murdered in a military […]

In the 1980s, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard asked, ‘Why does the World Trade Center have two towers?’[^1] The towers functioned, before Nine Eleven, as parallel surfaces mirroring one another. They became a symbol for the irrelevance of difference in a post-political world where acts disappear without consequence. A one-dimensional society. The symbolic eliminates difference in […]

There is a tendency in contemporary life for artists, academics, authors and activists to view Nine Eleven as the beginning of the Western world’s demise into fragmented populist nationalisms, reigniting the Cold War by substituting ‘Islamic terrorism’ for ‘Russian communism’. Although there is some truth to this myth, there is a danger when projecting American […]

Behrouz Boochani is translated from Farsi by Dr. Omid Tofighian, American University in Cairo/ University of Sydney. Hoda Afshar : In our different areas, we both make connections between real and fictionalised events, partly in order to question through art-making how certain narrative-truths are constructed. History and poetry, documentary and staged images, combine in our […]

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 […]