I recently applied for a job as a lawyer and met a new friend, The Ghost of Félix Guattari, The Famous French Philosopher and Psychotherapist Who’s Been Dead for Fourteen Years and is Currently Stuck in a Psychotherapeutic Purgatory. His apparition appeared to me as I attempted to fill out an Application for Employment Form, […]
Laura Castagnini : I met Rose Gibbs in December 2015 when I attended a two-day workshop at the Showroom in London entitled, fittingly, Our Future Network. Led by the artist Alex Martinis Roe, our small group of participants experimented with feminist collective strategies by undertaking a series of exercises developed from research into the Milan […]
Emile Zile is an artist, performer and filmmaker crafting poetic turns about the relationship between digital media and social conditions. His work provides a penetrating critique of how the manufactured outputs of the mass media and technology industries interact with our bodies, behaviours and feelings. It offers, in the artist’s words, ‘damaged optimism’ for humans […]
Jimmy Nuttall’s 2016 short film, GINA, is a reflection on contemporary malaise that borrows its structure as much from the haphazard mode of home movie-making as any historical avant-garde. Shot in Melbourne and its surrounding rural landscape, the video tells an experimental post-breakup narrative of Gina and Jules that begins with a cast of Jim’s […]
[^1] I remember when it happened. It was sometime between 2010 and 2012. The change took at least a couple of years to implement. We were living in Berlin then, traveling around Europe in the typical itinerant fashion, making manageable works of art and generally having an enjoyable time. My employer, Georgina Criddle, was banging […]
‘FOR THE CHICKEN = AGAINST THE CHICKEN.’[^1] The art world has been a major economic beneficiary of globalisation. The reduction of the costs of communication and transportation, coupled with the attenuation of barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, and technology has drastically expanded the art market. Economist Joseph Stiglitz, when noting the devastating […]
Amidst the otherwise rather austere mise-en-scène of a winter’s day at the Monash Art Design and Architecture (MADA) campus, the resplendent blue structure that is Gormenghast proves easy to find. Standing more than five metres tall, with a ground area of almost thirty square metres, the two-level wooden frame takes pride of place in the […]
THE NUMBER YOU HAVE REACHED 1–29 May 2016 SUCCESS Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Michael Candy, Antoinette J Citizen, JD Reforma, Andrew Varano, Tim Woodward, Greatest Hits (Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn) Curated by Sarah Werkmeister & Tim Woodward To start with, I get the opening hours wrong, and make the half-hour train trip […]
Sophia Dacy-Cole interviews artist and theorist Erin Manning on her keynote ‘For a Pragmatics of the Useless’ at the Transversal Matters conference, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, September 2015. SDC : un 10.1 focuses on Russian theorist Boris Aratov’s concept of the co-worker: the idea that objects are not merely inert, but have some […]
Meret Oppenheim made her furry-lined teacup on a whim. She made it quickly when she was young, then she spent a large part of the rest of her career trying to replicate its triumph. She was forever a slave to that early object’s success. We saw David Byrne sing Burning Down the House some years […]
Shelley McSpedden & Meredith Turnbull : Russian Constructivist theorist, Boris Arvatov, promoted the potential of ‘things’ to act as dynamic agents for social and political change. Does such a model of objects have relevance to the work that you do? Tahjee Moar : Boris Arvatov’s notion of ‘co-worker’ and the potential of ‘things’ to act […]
— Der Unterricht In German bread is brot and butter is butter I know this because I’m Toaster In German toaster is toaster — kitchen is küche that’s where I live and work mornings mostly in between Wasserkessel who’s desperate to please and Mauer who never speaks or moves What respect I have for Mauer! […]
Spooky Action at a Distance at Bus Projects, 9–30 January 2016 Amalie Smith, Amitai Romm, David Stjernholm, Rasmus Myrup, Valérie Collart and curated by Nanna Stjernholm Jepsen The polar icecaps have melted and Bus Projects finds itself submerged in the underwater world of Spooky Action at a Distance. This exhibition is the second, return iteration […]
Public Share is a New Zealand–based collective of seven artists (Monique Redmond, Harriet Stockman, Kelsey Stankovich, Deborah Rundle, Mark Schroder, Joe Prisk and, until recently, Kirsten Dryburgh) founded in 2014. Their work involves nuanced conversations embedded in acts of making and sharing. With a keen interest in participatory happenings, Public Share’s work has occupied allotted […]
Rapa Nui Ranelagh (2015), exhibited at West Space in October last year, marks a shift towards something softer and more forgiving. The work is based around a perfectly made, over-sized plinth-like table structure, which runs along the entire main wall of the large gallery, and whose seven, unevenly-spaced leg-sections are in keeping with lines drawn […]
The recent exhibitions of Melbourne artists Benjamin Woods, Georgina Criddle and Helen Grogan, consecutively programmed at West Space in 2015, can be seen to crystallise certain tendencies in contemporary local spatial practice.[^1] The current conversation around these projects centres on how they bring to the fore the dynamic but overlooked relations between objects, bodies and […]
Alana Hunt : You’ve worked extensively with Aboriginal art at major institutions in Australia, including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Gallery of Australia and, presently, in the New Museum Project at the Western Australian Museum. During this time you have maintained an ongoing focus on Indigenous objects in your work as a […]
In the tradition of OSW, the exhibition was comprised of a range of events, sculptural installations, performances and outdoor works that unravelled over various locations and times and was almost impossible to take in in its entirety. This curatorial approach encouraged recurring visits to the show, hunting for works across the Convent’s grounds and to […]