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

Anastasia Klose

You are never the person you expect to be

I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals. Brigitte Bardot I have not always loved dogs. I used to only love art. That was my main love. But things changed when I met Farnsworth. Farnsworth My partner Matt and I had driven up […]

Matthew P. Hopkins

Lullaby for Marbles

In Art and Ventriloquism, David Goldblatt examines the complex back and forth that occurs between artist, artwork, and audience as a mode of exchange akin to the way in which a ventriloquist animates their dummy. Goldblatt draws many comparisons between ventriloquism and art-making in terms of how they both facilitate a unique mode of speaking […]

Isabelle Sully

The anonymous donor: on Christopher D’Arcangelo via a curatorial problematic

Following his third arrest, Christopher D’Arcangelo’s father Allan D’Arcangelo, a prominent painter at the time, asked him, ‘Why are you going after the art institutions? You should be going after the banks. They’re the real criminals.’ With this preface in mind, it could be said that the two distinctly separate practices of Christopher D’Arcangelo, and […]

Audrey Schmidt

A 20/20 Retrospective

At the heart of the increasingly gentrified East Brunswick sits the artist-run gallery Punk Café, a name that makes a considered link between punk and the Australian middle class — exemplified by ‘café culture’. Like many of its contemporaries employing the language and aesthetic of punk antiestablishmentarianism, such as Info-Punkt (GE), Punk Café features a […]

Nat and Allan Randall

I was worried about you and you were worried about me

I can never have a poker face. Anybody looking at me can tell exactly what I’m thinking. — Gena Rowlands In May 2016, I invited 100 men to participate in a short scene derived from a John Cassavetes film, Opening Night, as part of a 24-hour durational performance at Australian Centre for the Moving Image […]

Keren Ruki

The ozriginal creative native

Amelia Wallin

Looking at you looking at you: performance and its documents in the internet age

Alex Cuffe

Uncanny Self

Ivan Ruhle and Tom Melick

Writing for the kitchen

A painting must always contend with space and, because of this, it can also liberate and expand space. Sometimes with maximum effort and sometimes with almost no effort at all. A tile is a unit, a component of a whole. A whole is complete, subject to a parameter, an outline that demarcates where the whole […]

Eva Birch

An interview with Katherine Botten

I met Katherine in 2014 on Facebook and looked up all her work online. Later, I was over at my friend’s house where Katherine was recording Human Pesticide, a noise project with Brennan Olver. She was shouting in an American accent ‘Fuck the world. Set it on fire. Fuck the state and the system. Symphony […]

Tiarney Miekus

ART and art (where the first is Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the second follows from the first)

Recently, I was on the phone describing Heidi Holmes’s installation at West Space in September 2016. ‘It’s this incredibly great work’, I said. ‘Normally there are big windows along one half of West Space gallery, but Heidi has built a room that covers these windows, with only a small square of light peeking out — […]

Tim Gregory and Vaughan W. O’Connor

Working with the invisible hypervisual

This article was conceived in response to the authors’ mutual participation in The Selfie and Social Activism Symposium at the University of NSW in December 2016. The event explored self-representation and critical agency within a broad visual context. This piece traces some of the tangential links between seemingly disparate areas of research; of Tim’s paper […]

Nick Terrell

Anzac Centenary Print Portfolio

Anxiety about the possibility of historical honesty runs through many of the portfolio pieces. Daniel Boyd’s lithograph, Untitled (2015), gives the clearest example of how this anxiety has shaped the collection. The work layers and then filters a sequence of associations. Boyd researched his grandfather’s service in the Memorial’s archives and found details about where […]

Anusha Kenny

Interview with Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan, 2016 (full transcript)

Nathan Gray

Charcoal, chalk and pencil

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing. — Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, 1973 1. Charcoal is a residue, the remaining carbon and ash left behind when a plant or animal has had all of the […]

Michelle James

Export quality extended: an exchange with The Office of Culture & Design (full transcript)

I remember walking past the vacant retail space on the corner of Lonsdale and Swanston Streets, quietly charting the course of its transformation. The shop came to be filled, sparingly, with trestle table desks, flat-pack cardboard boxes and rolls of packaging tape. The most salient clue that this store was ready to trade came with […]

Zanny Begg

Refuge/e

Australia is an island. The significance of this came home to me when I was talking to a friend who arrived here without papers. He explained to me how trapped he felt by our incongruous geography: ‘I am stuck, I can’t go anywhere.’ The distance from Melbourne to Sydney would be far enough to cross […]

Laura Castagnini

Dear Homophobia

Dear Homophobia, It’s difficult to write this letter. I have trouble raising my voice above your incessant shouting, something you often do in unison with your friend, Patriarchy. When I do, I often feel I am not heard. Last Saturday night, you convinced a man to enter a gay nightclub in Orlando and kill as […]

Pedro de Almeida

If you invested here: Sydney, SquatSpace and its Tour of Beauty

After eviction SquatSpace became the moniker for an artists’ collective, comprising Bonetto, de Souza, Ihlein and Quick, with Jimmy Sing and Dave Toecutter, that was determined to artistically address issues of housing and autonomy.[^5] Following interventions in urban space, such as unReal Estate (2002) for Newcastle’s This is Not Art festival and SquatFest (2001–10), an […]

Tristen Harwood

Love and decolonisation in actu

Sumugan Sivanesan

Mass action media: Ende Gelände, Break Free 2016

Tiarney Miekus

The polyphony of polyphonies

To throw around polyphony with an unstructured multiplicity and plurality is now a commonplace. Ideas of fluctuating disunity and rhizomatic structures clumsily circulate around the contemporary dialogue, resembling what some now terrifyingly call a ‘classic’ postmodernism. Yet there is more to say about polyphony than this now-normalised discourse, and Polyphonic Social stresses this shifting rhetoric. […]

Michelle James

Export quality extended: an exchange with The Office of Culture & Design

I remember walking past the vacant retail space on the corner of Lonsdale and Swanston Streets, quietly charting the course of its transformation. The shop came to be filled, sparingly, with trestle table desks, flat-pack cardboard boxes and rolls of packaging tape. The most salient clue that this store was ready to trade came with […]

Anusha Kenny

Interview with Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan

Anusha Kenny is a writer and lawyer from Melbourne. She would like to thank Liang Luscome, Charlie Sofo and Isadora Vaughan for their insights on the exhibition, which contributed to the questions asked in this interview. Anusha Kenny’s full interview with Catherine Ryan and Amy Spiers is available online as part of un Extended 10.2.

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