To be con-temporary does not necessarily mean to be present, to be here-and-now; it means to be ‘with time’ rather than ‘in time’… To be con-temporary … can thus be understood as being a comrade of time.[^1] — Boris Groys In his 1925 essay ‘Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Towards a Formulation […]

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 […]

The ornate floral display of Drakaea confluens; the hammer orchid mimics the appearance of the female Thynnid wasp in an evocative display. When the male wasp observes this sensuous flower it tries to mate with the orchid and so transfers its pollen. With this intimate inter-species encounter the wasp and the orchid become entangled in […]

In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life. — Karl Marx 124,908 took place in the city of Rustavi, Georgia, as part of the 2nd Tbilisi Triennial: ‘Self-Organised Systems’. The title of the show expanded the threads of Lucy R Lippard’s ‘numbers shows’. Curator Tara McDowell and host, Galaqtion Eristavi (of Georgian […]

One year earlier, in 1925, the Russian socialist theorist and art critic Boris Arvatov wrote that by discovering the underlying ‘relations between people and things, knowing [their] socio-historical substratum’, we could direct the developmental tendencies of material culture.[^2] The Present utilises the Past. The Past shifts the Present. Touches the Future (Card 6): Arvatov wanted […]

Saskia Doherty is an early career visual artist and writer based in Melbourne, working across drawing, printmedia, sculpture, ceramics, bookmaking, photography, video, sound, performance, text and poetry. Presented here is an audio artwork based on Saskia’s artist pages in this magazine, The deep clap of bronze against bronze reverberates over a stretch of space.

The deep clap of bronze against bronze reverberates over a stretch of space. Areas can be observed to stir, inhabitants rustled by the tongue’s shudder cast through the air. Even if this movement is not perceived aurally, it registers as an attunement of bodies. The narrator makes a low, thick noise — indecipherable. Morning time. […]

Wizard Rolling is a collaborative work between Andrea Eckersley and Susan Jacobs, combining Jacobs’ material investigation into the melting point of gallium with narration from excerpts of Eckersley’s article The artist as transcendental empiricist (featuring discussion of artworks by Jacobs and Canadian artist Elizabeth Zvonar) in un Magazine 10.1 magazine. Andrea Eckersley is an artist […]

Sophia Dacy-Cole is an MFA candidate at Monash University. Her research concerns the co-mingling of process philosophy, contemporary art and grassroots activism. This is the full interview with Sophia and 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, […]

It’s early October and I’ve come to Bétonsalon Centre for Art and Research for the opening of Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster. Three months since arriving in Paris, disaster is already decidedly in the air. The United Nations COP21 climate change talks (expected by most to be its own car crash of performative political inaction) are not […]

Vincent Silk is a writer. His work has appeared in Seizure, Archer, Going Down Swinging, MIX NYC, Slit, Alien She, and elsewhere.  Here Vincent interviews Despo Debby from the Australian sex worker art collective Debby Doesn’t Do It For Free about visual art and performance through collective and anonymous, art-making and current political issues in […]

We don’t create our song and dance like the way a rock ’n’ roll muso creates theirs. Our song and dance are given to us in two ways. They come from family, like an inheritance we become custodians for. And they come fresh in our dreams from spirits and Country. You know when you wake […]

Mashara Wachjudy is a Sydney-based emerging artist currently undertaking a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Arts at UNSW/Art & Design. Wachjudy’s work attempts to focus predominantly on the intricacies of cultural identity and belonging through the complex and interwoven relationships between place, time and culture. Wachjudy’s debut solo exhibition, Outside Inside, was […]

Kirsten Pieroth’s boiled and bottled copies of The New York Times, in her Conservation Piece (2010) in The Biography of Things, embody this material and relational perspective. The viewer is presented with a deconstructed language through physical reorganisation of the newspaper. Laid out like a school science experiment, the social and symbolic power of The […]

[^1] There was a sense of urgency to communicate with the objects before our time was up. I had to let them know we are still out here, waiting for them, remembering them; that they weren’t forgotten. — Julie Gough, Trawlwoolway artist, 2015.[^2] The title of Soviet writer Sergei Tretyakov’s 1929 essay ‘The Biography of […]

The conversation that follows is woven together from a series of emails and Skypes between Ariel Goldberg and myself. Goldberg’s first book of poetry The Photographer was recently published by Roof Books, New York. They are also curate Friday Nights at the Poetry Project in New York City. Our discussion centres on the forthcoming publication […]

Fibres from one woollen blanket found on tram stop outside Melbourne Central Station. “Warrnambool 1965” written on tag. Packaging from one battery operated lint shaver from Daiso. Rice paper from Daiso (for bonding paper fibres together). Butcher’s paper from Dean’s Art, rolled into an A4 piece of scrap paper that lists woodwind instruments (also included). […]

In Aotearoa New Zealand ‘Pacific art’ as a descriptor is taken for granted. As a curator—New Zealand–born with Sāmoan and English heritage—the question of labelling frequently comes up for me. In addition to being described as a ‘Pacific art curator’, I’m also placed in positions where I too need to contextualise and situate artists’ practices, […]

Some of these words were written while in the house of A.L Steiner, an artist whose practice is abundant with intersecting threads, beginning with her strong, wide lesbian and queer community and weaving outward into environmental activism and racial politics. At her current exhibition in Los Angeles Come & Go, one can request to view […]

Drawing from questions written with Adelle Mills and Pip Wallis, I met a few members of the Karrabing Film Collective (Linda Yarrowin, Rex Edmunds, Natasha Lewis, Gavin Bianamu, Elizabeth Povinelli and their friend, Susan Edmunds) during their time in Melbourne, in August. The collective were showing two short films at the Melbourne International Film Festival: […]

BETH CAIRD: Could you please introduce your practice to us, a largely new Australian audience, in the lead up to your show at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane? PATRICK STAFF: I suppose I am preoccupied at the moment with thinking about how particular bodies are presented, produced, represented and assessed. I am […]