Henri Papin was born on 6th June , third child and second son of his parents, who had between six and eight children. His father was a successful goldsmith, in the rural town of Tours in the Loire Valley in France. He emigrated to Australia in with his family and arrived in Tasmania in . […]

Clock Tower Studio, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth 21 September – 19 December 2010 For three months during his residency at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Jacobus Capone created Nine Prayers for Palomar, a series of nine works based on the protagonist of Italo Calvino’s novel Mr Palomar. Calvino’s novel consists of twenty-seven […]

Barbara Kapusta, Desire and What You End up Doing, RMIT Project Space, Melbourne 27 August – 16 September 2010 Dying in Spite of the Miraculous, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 8 October – 6 November 2010 Things I Wish I’d Known, West Space, Melbourne 29 October – 20 November 2010 A work of art produces its own […]

Conventionally a retrospective exhibition is taken as an occasion for the artist to present his [sic] work to date as a reified, ‘logical’ whole, and as an opportunity to demonstrate that he has progressed. That one should be offered such an opportunity at all suggests the achievement of a certain currency in art world chit-chat, […]

Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA, Melbourne 10 March – 9 April 2011 curated by Matthew Shannon The spectre of late 1960s art haunts Margaret Seaworthy Gothic — from the exhibition’s title, sourced from the font designed in 1968 by New York artist Lawrence Weiner, to curator Matthew Shannon’s accompanying text, which positions the exhibition in relation […]

Artist-writers, art writing and art as writing … un Magazine 5.1 blurs the boundaries between these roles, mashing-up narratives both real and fake in current practice. Can fiction be critical? un Magazine commissioned writer Dr Jeanne Randolph to riff on her ficto-critical practice, to which she responded with a text that begins with a girdle, […]

Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart 22 January 2011 – 19 July 2011 Claire Lambe and Elvis Richardson In January 2011 an audacious new public museum was added to Australia’s cultural landscape. Located on a cliff-front in the outskirts of Hobart, the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA) houses the private art collection […]

The rationality of a grid on a map sinks into what it is supposed to define… One is liable to see things in maps that are not there. One must be careful of the hypothetical monsters that lurk between the map’s latitudes…[^1] What is legitimacy? What is it that makes a person, a group or […]

Kel Glaister (b. Melbourne 1984) is currently in Europe following an Australia Council Residency in Paris at the Cité International in 2010 and is currently on a residency at the 17th International Studio Program of the ACC Galerie Weimar and the City of Weimar. Glaister has been working with sculpture in recent years and this […]

Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis 20 November 2010 – 15 January 2011 Culturgest, Porto, 5 February – 23 April 2011 If I’m going to be completely honest with you, I have never been to Minneapolis nor [sic] Porto so I too have never ‘seen’ the show. — email to the editor, 22 April 2011 ‘Completely honest’, […]

History-History The fictional device of creating self-contained worlds in which plots and characters can unfold is not so far removed from the artistic strategy of creating hermetic situations wherein new rationales are allowed to evolve, not necessarily plausible in the ‘outside world’ but reasonable enough in their own terms. In German, geschichten means both history […]

Like so many insidious and powerful organisations before them, Bababa International (BI) prefer to remain undefined. At present, its six members are nameless and the collective will only agree publicly on their location (Bababa International Airport, Redfern) and their commitment to making and exhibiting art under the BI designation. Perhaps it is this indifference to […]

If a work of art was a woman’s body, could psychoanalytic theory serve as her girdle? A gal such as myself never overlooks an opportunity to exploit mundane activities for their metaphors, and I was definitely washing underwear when I realised I could write ficto-criticism. It was 1983 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and I was […]

When Kate Newby scrawled ‘we must build in the open’ in her idiosyncratic script onto the floorboards of Gambia Castle as part of her 2007 exhibition On the benefits of building, I always assumed she was privileging the ‘open’ as that improvisational, and yet urgent domain of self-actualisation. In a culture premeditated on the associative […]

Burros Ballot Ry Haskings TCB art inc., Melbourne 9–26 June 2010 TCB art inc. played host to Ry Haskings’ coy spatial investigations in his most recent exhibition, Burros Ballot, which reflected a practice that has developed from a boisterous humour to one of oblique strategies. His interest in the frame as the platform for staging […]

Pebble Botanica and (there will be a) New Garden Benedict Ernst Innovators 1 at Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 10 April – 9 May 2010 The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. — Marcel Proust The perceived alterity of the East has long been a […]

The First Working Retrospective of the Fauxist International Curated by Vivian Ziherl Metro Arts Galleries, Brisbane 7–19 June 2010

Lazy Slum Tape Projects and Six_a Blindside, Melbourne 19–21 August 2010 The opening of Lazy Slum at Blindside coincided with the Nicholas Building’s annual open studio event. Lazy Slum, a collaboration between Melbourne collective Tape Projects and Hobart group Six_a was described by Blindside as a ‘cross-disciplinary experiment in what happens when you build a […]

When encouraged to consider an editorial direction for un 4.2, it seemed premature to impose any stricture or criterion upon the magazine’s content. Given that open access is fundamental to the organisation’s ethos, and that this rests upon sourcing contributions through an open-call for submissions, it seemed more appropriate to wait and allow the selected […]

Amongst other initiatives arising in the -current community-obsessed zeitgeist is the commencement of Melbourne’s own FreeSchool. This alternative form of pedagogy has distinct legacies and structures in different countries, springing from education movements that defied state (or church in the case of countries such as Spain at the turn of the twentieth century) institutionalised education […]

Australia cannot pretend to be Europe, the differences are vast and deeply significant to us, and these differences are what we must realise so that we might develop a consciousness of our situation-identity.[^1] Having recently spent the month of July in Australia — mostly in Melbourne as part of Gertrude Contemporary’s Visiting Curators Program — […]

Here you are, standing on the edge of the precipice, feeling your blood thump against the abyss. Look at you, contemplating that awesome and terrible vastness. Friedrich would be proud. You stand here and you think: what could I say to you, Universe? Monkey! Monument! Heartbeat! Sunset! Who is receiving these vibrations, anyway? Which bit […]

Nicholas Mangan Notes from a Cretaceous World Published by The Narrows in association with Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2010 Hardcover, 88 pages, 115 × 217 mm, edition of 500 I remember lying on scratchy carpet as a kid, watching the Common-wealth Games on TV, and yelling with admiration as Nauru’s single athlete, a chubby teenage weightlifter, […]

The Public School is an autonomously organising direct-education project initiated in Los Angeles in 2007. Identified as ‘a school with no curriculum’, The Public School sessions are developed from the starting point of a class request posted to a website which then gathers a student body and, finally, a teacher. At the time of writing, […]