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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
‘Actions live off the images’ So said one of the plenary speakers at the Lausitz Climate Camp, following the first day of action. On the previous night an action primer video, a short documentary following activists from camp to pit to police van during last year’s Ende Gelände, was screened in the camp’s central circus […]
Whilst outwardly concerned with typologies of contemporary kitsch, Peoples’ practice is actually based in extensive research. He has racked up hours studying local history in the Belgrave Library, and even more on the internet, piecing together information about local alien and UFO sightings. The most famous local UFO sighting, indeed one of the most renowned […]
Only he can see the whole, he says, because he can see there is no whole — Lázló Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance.[^1] Moss is hard to draw. I’m sitting in the garden of a small temple on the outskirts of Kyoto. In front of me is a thick carpet of moss, only occasionally pierced […]
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 […]
Imagine yourself strolling into a gallery. You pause at the entry to read the introductory wall text but find yourself struggling to see much over the shoulders of other patrons. Rather than stand on tiptoes, you use your phone to scan the QR code pasted on the wall. You are instantly taken to a page […]
The co-worker is the maximum cohesion of the thing and its purpose. A collaboration between the material energies of humanity, technology and the spontaneous forces of nature. Boris Arvatov’s co-workers were electricity, radio, urban landscaping, Le Corbusier’s house as a ‘machine for living’. Our co-workers are multivalent. A co-worker is that, this, you, me. They […]
What is immediately striking about Boris Arvatov’s co-worker theory lies in a social reconfiguration of the relationship to the object; rather than urging a slowing or cessation of commercial production, Arvatov advocates for relationships with the material that are meaningful and productive. Where Arvatov sees the saturation of ‘thing’ as a ground for contemplation and […]
— 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 […]
A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. — Vladimir Nabokov, […]
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 […]