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

Tina Havelock Stevens

(Not just a) One Trick Pony 2013

(Not just a) One Trick Pony from Tina Havelock Stevens on Vimeo. Tina Havelock Stevens is a multi-disciplinary Sydney-based artist whose work is defined by a meditation on the relationships we have with each other, the places we inhabit, and ourselves.Often depicting landscapes, she dwells on sites that are abandoned, decaying, deserted and vacant, to […]

Kate Mitchell

Throwing The Artist Out 2016 digital print Selection from a series of 50 Courtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery and Chalk Horse

Vanessa Berry

Funny Land 2017

Funny Land is a 1930s fun house, the only one of its kind left in the world. Part of Sydney’s Luna Park, it resembles a fairytale castle on the outside, a bizarre gymnasium on the inside. The towers and onion-shaped dome on the exterior disguise what is really nothing more than a giant shed, like […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

Karrabing Film Collective

The Karrabing Film Collective 2017

These videos accompany Growing up Karrabing, a conversation with Gavin Bianamu, Sheree Bianamu, Natasha Lewis Bigfoot, Ethan Jorrock and Elizabeth Povinelli published in un Magazine 11.2. The Karrabing Film Collective is a film cooperative consisting of friends and family members whose lives interconnect along Indigenous coastal homelands northwest of Darwin, NT.

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 […]

Robert Pulie

Pink Octagons Wednesday 25 August 2010

compiled from Google Images Robert Pulie is represented by The Commercial

Melissa Deerson

Notes from underwater I 2017

Melissa Deerson works across various artforms, often exploring the interaction between society and the natural world. Notes from underwater draws from the research, notes and doodles that she made during an extended trip through Italy and Europe that resulted in the artwork Five minutes with a moray eel (2016). The companion piece to this work […]

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 […]

Melissa Deerson

Notes from underwater II 2017

I recently went travelling to see a 13th century mosaic of Jonah being eaten by a whale (that bible story) in a church in Italy. I was away for nearly two months, visiting museums, galleries, churches, looking at medieval manuscripts, reading Moby Dick… mostly underwater themed, I guess. I was on a sea voyage. The […]

Sarah Goffman

Sixty-seven Women Artists (of more than two hundred who I know) 2015

watercolour on paper

Wart

Mo-bile (Carriageworks, 2007); In between breaths (Performance Space, 2006)

Wart is a Sydney-based performance artist, painter, illustrator and cartoonist who has been exhibiting and performing in Australia since the early 1980s. Here is documentation from two works from Wart’s archive: Mo-bile (Carriageworks, 2007) and In between breaths (Performance Space, 2006) This is a companion piece to Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s article ‘Mental Olympics: in between […]

John Spiteri

Inside out 2017

digital images courtesy the artist, Sarah Cottier, Sydney and Neon Parc, Melbourne

Amelia Wallin

Looking at you looking at you: performance and its documents in the internet age 2017

In Looking at you looking at you: performance and its documents in the internet age Amelia Wallin delves into Kate Blackmore’s The Glass Bedroom, a documentary mini-series that profiles six Australian millennial artists who use Instagram as a platform for performance. Their works are highly constructed images of themselves and their lives — a mash-up […]

Keith Wong

un contributors page 2017

Digital Image

Matthew P. Hopkins

Lullaby for Marbles 2017

Matthew P. Hopkins is a Sydney based artist working with sound, painting, drawing, objects, video, and text based work. An ongoing interest for Hopkins is how sound, particularly processed voice, might be seen as grotesque and liminal in nature, and in turn how this sound can function as an axis point which connects the optical […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 — […]

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 […]

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 […]

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