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 […]

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 […]

on 2000 (clothing); untitled (Hana and looks), digital collage; untitled (professional poker players, mother of pearl violin brooch), digital collage; untitled (mother’s handmade hair clip, flowers, pink, green), digital photograph; untitled (mustard torture, magazine), synthetic felt and magazine pages; all 2017

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 […]

REPLETION; A SUM, 2017; LATE DINING, 2017

Rise and Fall (I, II, III) 2017 Courtesy the artist & Milani Gallery

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Puffing Billy 2016; Hospitality 2017; Sale Chocolate 2017; Cat 2016; Iphone 7 ad 2017; Nail gun and Dad 2017; Lauren 2016; Volcano 2016; all digital images

Sydney-based performance collective post is Zoë Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor and Natalie Rose. They have been making work together for over ten years. The word that is missing from this podcast — a word mentioned by all interviewees that never made it into the final cut — is ‘daggy’. Through sampling pieces from their archives […]

David Capra : Amelia, what do you find funny? Amelia Winata : I appreciate humour that reacts against the current politically correct climate we live in. I recently saw this old Asian woman in the spa of the council pool who was wearing yellow plastic glasses frames (no lenses) and a yellow vinyl golfing cap. […]

(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 […]

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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.