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 […]

identity politics One of the most important things that identity politics has taught us is that the distinction between being and doing is fraught. To think you have to perform an action. To perform an action you have to discard frivolity and set yourself on solid ground. Discourses of violence are inextricable from the subjects […]

I am selfish and so is everyone else under capitalism who can afford an iPhone. Men like to talk about surveillance as if it is the state. Women take photos of themselves. A famous woman selling herself is the archetype of us all. Selfish, Kim Kardashian West’s book of selfies taken over her lifetime, induces […]

Dear J,[^1] As you have made note, decomposition occurs quickly in the tropics. Notably, it is a common desire amongst those concerned that your body not touch the ground throughout these procedures (Skeat, Evans). With this in mind we press on. After your initial demise the first expressions of grief are emitted (Snouk Hujronje). They […]

Choreographer Anouk van Dijk investigates the possibilities afforded by the blind spot in a piece titled Depth of Field, presented by Chunky Move, which took place in the ACCA forecourt over a series of evenings in March, 2015.[^9] Ostensibly, the performance consists of Chunky Move dancers James Vu Anh Pham, Tara Jade Samaya and Niharika […]

The show is also partly about vagina. Vagina is not a theme but it is a thing that turns up in Georgette Brown’s painting Painfully aware at the moment of salvation (2015). There’s a vagina and a uterus with their own moon/egg in vibrating patterns of pastels and texture—a small piece of paua (mother of […]

acontented slave Can name six beaches where deeper riots started and haven’t finished his moral necessity synthetic polymer surfboards with a human debt when does a man cease to be a man standing up in the water the foam over print standing, making contact contact meaning death Wutan #2 mother on the other side of […]

Before a wall of mirrors, five performers dance for their reflections. The room heaves with bodies and music pumps through the crowd like a pulse. The audience beyond the mirrors can’t see the performers, only screens transmitting a live-feed of the performance just out of sight. They cheer anyway. Sydney-based performance artist Bhenji-Ra’s practice foregrounds […]

An artist and a law graduate go to ‘Is Prison Obsolete’, a conference held by Sisters Inside, a group advocating to abolish prison and to provide advocacy for women.[^1] Feeling pretty unaware, seriously interested and somewhat illegitimate, they attempt to find a way through the murky social structures of race, gender, class, power and privilege. […]

Falling as a craning neck the sky quotes eucalyptus. I wait at an exit point between demarcated parks. Heated numbers ascend twelve steps from trains of oiled bars. Like the times that I had visited before I anticipate warmth. Like those times that I had visited before I am affected by the certainty of the […]

We started thinking about different forms by which art makes an address to politics after a visitor commented on a perceived lack of political content in Australian art. As a local said of such opinions: ‘It’s like they think we don’t have e-flux here.’ So we tried to identify different manifestations of politics in some […]

‘The practice of happiness is subversive when it becomes collective.’[^1] The idea that we must move towards more collective ways of understanding ourselves as subjects is so commonly held it is almost a priori. Perhaps the most surprising and amusing call to community I have encountered recently is in K-Hole marketing report Youthmode. K-Hole is […]

the entire floor is a bath. the elevator opens up and you just step down into the bath. its about the size of five bedrooms. the roof and walls are painted blue black with the lighting installed to look like the milky way. it stretches across all of the ceiling. i am floating on my […]

We’re not going to pull the death of the author on you again. No, not that again![^1] —Claire Fontaine, Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications, 2005 While researching for this piece I came across a blog article seeking to verify the popular attribution to Pablo Picasso of the quote: ‘Good artists copy; great […]

Cartoon meets calligraphy meets word game meets mind map. Such is the mode of Agatha Gothe-Snape’s Free Speaking, which ran at Gertrude Contemporary’s Studio 12 from 17 October to 15 November 2014. Marked with an almost-anachronistic handwritten immediacy, the suite of drawings were made perfunctorily by the artist over a period of one week, in […]