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

Sean Rafferty

Five Queensland Fruit Cartons

Giselle Stanborough and Athena X

RHOS

In the early years of the twenty-first century, a very clever executive producer at Bravo had the multimillion-dollar idea of pairing the character clichés of Desperate Housewives with the consumerist content of MTV Cribs. In 2006, The Real Housewives of Orange County was born. Ratings soared over the late 2000s as The Great Recession ravaged […]

Carrie Miller and Andrew Frost

Art Humour Dialogue

Andrew Frost : Is there ever a wrong time to laugh at an artist’s work? This is a question that has worried me. I suppose the answer is, when the humour isn’t intentional. But it’s a tricky business. I remember going to a few early shows by Guy Benfield and thinking the work was really […]

Zara Sigglekow

Bad jibes: camp, humour, and taste in the art of Matthew Harris

Motifs in Matthew Harris’s lurid works include flowers, copulating pigs, and a gravestone inscribed with a gold sad face. Born in 1991 and raised in Wangaratta, Matthew’s artistic output to date has included video, tapestry, sculpture and painting. He works within a gay camp parlance. Artifice, riffs, cuteness, violence and comic eroticism come together in […]

Chiara Scafidi

It’s not humour it’s satire

We were sitting in a dark lecture theatre when it happened. I can’t believe it happened. My hand was raised. The moderator looked at me in acknowledgement. And then it happened. I asked Marcia Langton a question. I said, ‘Can you speak to the humour in Brook Andrew’s work?’ She replied with a deafening silence, […]

Alistair Baldwin

Australian art is already funny — we just need to add a laugh track

But that’s work that I’m doing. And if taking art out of an art gallery is a necessary step for me to enjoy myself, then surely that speaks more to a problem with galleries than anything else? What can art spaces actively do to meet us halfway? Certainly, the proper curation of comedy is a […]

Joel Stern

The joke that isn’t funny anymore

Experimental music desperately needs a turn to humour, satire, parody and, most of all, reflexivity, if it is to remain listenable. I can almost see this turn taking shape in the form of a long and unfolding joke. But, like any joke, the punchline can only work if you’re alive to the setup. I propose […]

Karrabing Film Collective

Growing up Karrabing: a conversation with Gavin Bianamu, Sheree Bianamu, Natasha Lewis Bigfoot, Ethan Jorrock and Elizabeth Povinelli

The Karrabing Film Collective (KAC) is a grassroots arts and film cooperative consisting of friends and family members whose lives interconnect along the coastal waters west of Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia. Begun in 2008 when members of the extended family found themselves homeless in the wake of deteriorating conditions on their natal […]

Sarah Werkmeister

What is this? I don’t know: pushing rocks up hills

SW : Can you give us more of a moving description of the video work’s narrative? MC : One of the things to note is that there’s a lot of Nepali text in the film as it was intended to be a Nepali film. Yet there’s only one scene of dialogue; one robot says ‘What […]

Kalinda Vary

Has anyone seen the Manic Mothers?

un Magazine got in touch with me to see if I’d write a piece on humour for this humorous issue. They asked me because I’m a woman, and I make performance-based work which always seems to have a humorous twist to it, somewhere. For instance, with my West Space show last year, I had people […]

David Attwood

Two Harpic Lemon Toilet Rim Blocks 2017

Two Harpic Lemon Toilet Rim Blocks is an ongoing series of interventions involving the installation of toilet rim blocks within the toilets of various art galleries and museums across Victoria. As a wry service provision and play on the colloquial use of the term lemon, the series suggests an institutional irreverence that extends to include […]

Marian Abboud and Vicki Van Hout

Kill me now! Kill me now! Kill me now! Conversations: Hong Kong to Sydney

Vicki Van Hout : Kill me now! Kill me now! Kill me now! I’m going to get done for saying… I’m going to get done for saying… I’m going to get done for saying… Kill me now! Marian Abboud : Stop saying that, say something catchy and intellectual, you’re going to get in trouble for saying […]

Laura Couttie

Dear Masato, all at once (get a life, the only thing that cuts across the species is death)

Gemma Weston

Desert Body Creep

Desert Body Creep Angela Goh Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) 24–28 January 2017 She starts with a series of statuesque poses while a Willow Smith track plays: I left my consciousness in the 6th dimension. I wonder where the mind of a dancer goes as they run their body through a routine for the […]

Kate Britton

The Talk

Mish Grigor The Talk Performance Space 2–5 November 2016 My uncle first told my mother he was HIV positive in 1983, the same year I was born. For many in East Sydney in the early 1980s, diagnosis meant death. For my uncle, this did not come as quickly as for many, mercifully; he died of […]

Daniel Mudie Cunningham

Mental Olympics: in between breaths with Wart

A body lies hiding beneath a thick sheet of black plastic, the kind used by firemen to extinguish fire. Giving way to movement and form, the plastic becomes a percussive skin used to thrash out sound. A release of manic energy. Finding quiet in the rage. ‘I used that a lot to go into that […]

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

Blackmore and cinematographer Bonnie Elliott’s beautifully constructed visuals detail the exhaustive preparation, posing and filtering of each subject’s photos. Multiple methods of image production are at play here: the subjects take selfies that are interwoven into the production of the documentary shoot, and we are no longer sure of whose image is whose. The footage […]

Alex Cuffe

Uncanny Self

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