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

Ella Benore Rowe

Back Home

My Mum Elvie would draw lines. Lines that represented the coastline, curved lines for the palm trees with smaller lines for the bushy branches and leaves. A big sun in the sky and waves in the sea. Mum would draw a turtle and ask me, ‘Ella, what is this?’ My earliest memory of creating art […]

Therese Keogh and Jacqui Shelton

A Rhythmic Pattern of Touching Hands, a Linking of Bodies and Actions.

My left hand hangs down, weighted by a gold wedding band. My palm cups a circular space. Intruding into this space, a child’s fingers poke at my fingertips. My right hand grasps firmly at a fat baby’s waist. The baby reaches towards a man, but I lean away from him, offering my feet on a […]

Sarah L. Thomson

Batting for the same team: Collaboration, negotiation and support in the works of Parallel Park

Parallel Park was borne out of a desire to explore the shared experience of being in a serious queer relationship for the first time. It is the collaborative practice of Holly Bates and Tayla Jay Haggarty, two Brisbane-based artists who met while studying visual art at the Queensland University of Technology. Since 2015 the duo […]

Kate ten Buuren

making heaps of friends and making heaps of enemies

to know yourself andto know each other is the revolution The very existence of our collective this mob is simultaneously intriguing and threatening to outsiders. Collectivising when bla(c)k* is instantly politicised by others; we can be blak** but not too blak, and we still need to exist within the systems that silence and oppress us. […]

Amber Wright

Investments in Silence: Collaboration, Collusion and Complicity

1: I speak from a position of solidarity with victim/survivors (I think about the temporality implied in this language and think ‘endurer’ may be more apt) past, present, and future. Those who have shared their stories, those who have not come forward and those who never will. 2: This letter was in response to news […]

Sally Olds and Rosie Funder

Seeking Arrangement

This transcript began as a conversation between Alex Griffin, Rosie Funder, and Sally Olds, and was edited into its final form by Rosie Funder and Sally Olds. Sally Olds : To me the thing that became painfully apparent was that I didn’t believe in poly as a political form. And all my energy and, uh, […]

Michael Spooner and Darius Le

On Affection

The Victorian Pride Centre was a hard-won project that would secure a future built legacy for the state’s LGBTIQA+ community. It proposed a single building for health service providers, youth advocates, and festival and entertainment networks, underpinned by a performance venue and exhibition space, and an archive. Located on Fitzroy Street in the seaside suburb […]

Lauren Burrow and Tristen Harwood

Forgetting Architecture and the new Aboriginal Kitsch

Between the subjugation and indifference of colonial governance, Ngurungaeta, William Barak leads the Wurundjeri people in a sustained decolonising movement, seeking land-rights at Coranderrk. They petition ministers, writing letters and walking to Melbourne to protest directly to the Premier. is goes on in the face of dispossession. And, in 1881 there is a rupture in […]

Genevieve Grieves

Connecting with wounded spaces

I have long been concerned with memories of colonial violence in the Australian landscape; places that have witnessed harm and continue to hold these traumatic memories in the present. Their existence was something I was attuned to as a child constantly travelling regional New South Wales with my family, visiting places and people, connecting with […]

Suzanne Kite

Who Believes in Indians?

American contemporary mythologies spring from American founding mythologies. The events of Columbus’ arrival, the American revolution, and the signing of the Constitution washed away terra nullius to reveal the American nation. The enduring desire to avoid facts or truths is evident in America today via the fervor for conspiracy theory.[^1] Nearly fifty per cent of […]

Ainslee Meredith

Deposits

The archive is built to keep out water. The archive is built on the edge of the floodplain of the Moonee Ponds Creek on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Water is excluded from the archive because of the risks it poses to paper and other organic materials. Mould can germinate […]

Tāwhanga Nopera

Watch the stars – we navigate points of light in the dark

Whakapapa is generally translated as genealogy. Whakapapa can mean to lie flat, to place in layers, to recite in order; or considered in parts as ‘whaka’ – cause to be, to become; and ‘papa’ which can mean – the Earth, or anything broad flat and hard. In te reo Māori ‘papa’ has many meanings associated […]

Ellen O’Brien

Beyond Remembering: The Role of Memorialisation in Decolonisation

‘Did you know Barangaroo is named after a courageous and spirited Aboriginal woman?’ So says a section of the Barangaroo website titled ‘The Stories’, the question posed above an aerial image of a glass-walled building. Barangaroo is an urban redevelopment on the harbour of what is currently called Sydney; a place where the ‘past meets […]

Rebecca McCauley

Australian landscape photography: the colonial project, the panorama, its undoing

A sunset over gentle oceans~ Bondi Beach Awakening Time-lapse shot of a waterfall~ Caressing Waters (alternatively Majestic Beauty, or, Waters of Life) The still course of a waterway,mirroring the bushland above~ River Reflections Uluru during a storm, at sunrise~ Heartland Revival People want peace in their lives and in their surroundings and nothing delivers as […]

Natasha Matila-Smith

The quiet need no defence

We were trying to blast this myth that the non-Western Other exists in a time and place that is completely untouched by Western civilization or that in order to be authentic one would have to be devoid of characteristics associated with the West. It’s reasonable to say that non-Western cultures have a better understanding of […]

Kenzee Patterson

Log somewhat overshadowed by utilitarian roof structure

Beginning in March 2016, I undertook a two-year period of practice-led research as part of a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) research degree at Sydney College of the Arts. The origin of the research project lay in a self-reflexive inquiry into my attraction to working with steel and other metals in my art practice. Through […]

Susie Anderson

beyond rewriting the story achieving Indigenous sovereignty through Virtual Reality

Our knowledge of land as its own technology is second to none. Two hundred and thirty years of adapting as necessary, often as lives depended on it, has seen us turn to other mediums. We used the tools that arrived on boats. Our storytellers use English in literature, cameras in photography, film and many other […]

Julie Gough

The Traveller

Lately I’ve started driving around Tasmania again, making another film. Since 2009 I’ve made twenty-four of them, I can’t stop. Short, long, some seem unwatchable, nevertheless they record and become a record, a counter to so much that seems missing. They are my memory work. Sometimes it is hard to start, to reverse out of […]

Georgina Watson

Larks in the dawn

Georgina Watson currently lives in Tāmaki Makaurau and has recently completed an MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts. Recent projects include ‘Haughty Skies’ in Distracted Reader #3, Auckland, forthcoming (2018), Anxious Garden, Enjoy Gallery, Wellington (2017), Pack Lite Organised by Stella Corkery, NY, LA, Auckland (2017) ‘Collective Fruits’ in Wormhole, Melbourne (2016), amongst others. […]

Beth Sometimes and Lorrayne Gorey

Angkentye arle akngerrele

Lowlee : Can we just talk like now and you can record or … ? Beth : Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK I’m recording now Lowlee : Ye, kele. Beth : Ye, ka … Lowlee : Werte! Beth : (laughs) Werte! Ayenge Arrernte akweke ware akaltye-irre … ke, no — how do I say it in […]

un Projects

Singing the Archive – presenting Ara Irititja

What you are about to read is a demonstration of Ara Irititja given at the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) Conference in December 2016.[^1] In the darkened lecture theatre, a clip from the Ara Irititja archive is projected onto the wall. It shows old people including Rene Kulitja’s father Walter Pukutiwara performing inma at a […]

Fran Edmonds, Jessica Bennett and Lily Graham

‘Places’ of belonging: Korin Gamadji Institute, the Sovereignty exhibition and contemporary Aboriginal youth culture

In southeast Australia the Aboriginal population is young; more than fifty percent are under twenty-five-years old. Yet, Aboriginal young people in Victoria remain a minority within the broader community. Many have limited opportunities to engage in programs reflecting their everyday experiences or to identify with others from similar backgrounds. The following is a conversation between […]

Kate Leah Rendell

An unsettled Settler response to Open Cut

Settlers Miners Same Thing – Jacky Green Although I know Aboriginal sovereignty as always present, embedded within country, I find my strongest encounters with specific sovereignties of place often occur in unexpected moments – like a bolt of remembering – chanced upon in the presence of a scar tree or a reference found deep within […]

Fresh and Fruity

Did you know that the world is ending?

i wish the earth would j swallow me. Keep on dancing till the world ends. Dreams of the volcanoes in Tāmaki Makaurau violently convulsing. Clasping hands together under the table. Our breath moving in sync. Stripping back the flesh to reveal the whiteness of our bones. Grinding bones into dust. Bone marrow and blood absorbed […]

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