Amy Jane Parker is an artist, artist facilitator and disability support worker based in Naarm/Melbourne.

Dear J, I’ve been meaning to follow up on my previous letter for a while now, thinking I knew what I wanted to write but also nervous about the inevitable failures of assigning words; of failing to articulate their incomparability.[^1] In this letter I’d like to think about clinker, a residual geology of metalworking, as […]

What do we do about the extractive industries and their persistent and pervasive presence within the arts industry as sponsors, facilitators and (un)welcome benefactors? There is no easy answer to this question — the arts seem to be reliant upon the financial support of extractive industries, either through direct corporate sponsorship or indirectly, via funds […]

Kenzee Patterson is a settler-colonial descendant whose art practice combines material experimentation with historical research, autobiography and language, motivated by the imperative to confront the ecological and socio-cultural repercussions of resource extraction and material displacement.

As the COVID-19 pandemic caused Australian theatres, music venues, galleries and museums to close, the Federal Government’s response to the ensuing crisis raised the question of whether they view the arts as surplus to the economy. Government stimulus for the sector, both meagre and delayed, is unlikely to hinder the ongoing destruction of careers, infrastructure […]

Talia Smith is an artist and curator from Aotearoa New Zealand and now based in Sydney. She is of Sāmoan, Cook Island and NZ European heritage. Both her visual arts and curatorial practices explores notions of time, memory and familial histories, with a focus on the centring of diverse voices within the wider canon of […]

it’s all a new mythology … for our time … some sort of heroic … and it has created new mythologies and you better take them seriously. Yes they are out there and don’t ignore them — Werner Herzog Disney’s Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian is a model twenty-first century enterprise—an elaborate extraction machine […]

Amy Jane Parker is an artist, artist facilitator and disability support worker based in Naarm/Melbourne.

༼ つ ✿◕‿◕✿༽つ (‿ˠ‿) the BWS is now a BWyaasssssS as in yass queen as in yasssss gay pride as in yass we co-opted this lingo from black queer communities on the other side of the world as in BeerWineSpirits is now a place to drink down some black queer liberation on land stolen that […]

Kenzee Patterson is a settler-colonial descendant whose art practice combines material experimentation with historical research, autobiography and language, motivated by the imperative to confront the ecological and socio-cultural repercussions of resource extraction and material displacement.

Contemporary art is kind of a pyramid scheme: the few artists who make a living making art in this speculative market obscure the vast majority who must do all kinds of other work to pay for food, rent and the art practice itself. I say this not to create an us-versus-them situation between more and […]

With the implementation of lockdowns and social distancing measures last year we witnessed an almost overnight closure of a large part of the Australian arts sector, prompting a widespread call for financial support. These calls for assistance often took a well-trodden road, emphasising the significant contribution that the sector makes to the national economy, as […]

Lucreccia Quintanilla is an artist, writer, DJ and researcher gratefully living and working on the unceded lands of the Boon Wurrung and Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) peoples of the Kulin Nation. Her practice is both an individual and collaborative one which manifests into outcomes within galleries and also as events and performances outside of that context. Her […]

Jungku Ngambala Ngarrur Ngarrumba Yarkijina Yurrngumba(We sit peacefully in our lands forever) — Garrwa Yanyuwa Elder Nancy McDinny In 2020 pandemic conditions created an extreme sense of isolation and containment. The city slowed down to lockdown pace here on unceded Gadigal lands as the terror of COVID-19 began to unravel through all sorts of media […]

If attention was an experiment in living, rather than a deal or a calculation. —Adam Phillips I looked up from the breakfast table to the highest window in the apartment. There, silently, a plane made its way from the left jamb to the right and was gone. It was the first I’d seen flying in […]

Much of our work as a critical art collective turns on two senses of the word ‘surplus’: surplus populations, that is, people who are forced to the margins of or outside the wage relation and whose ambivalent status as labour-in-waiting and revolutionary potential translates into often violent disciplinary regimes of the state; and surplus value, […]

We began this issue with questions. What does it mean to sit against something? What does it mean to create against something? What are we against? How do we make art against the world? Does anti necessarily inscribe a binary logic? Does ante necessarily inscribe a chronological one? We still have all these questions, but […]

The desire for a disalienated life-world — as envisioned in the slogan bread and roses — is if nothing else the demand for everyone to enjoy the kinds of aesthetic contingency that capital cordons off for the wealthy. Kay Gabriel I write to you but in public; my description of you exceeds our relation. It […]

ANTI/ANTE DANCER : (noun) A dancer who is preoccupied not with the expressive notion of dance, but with the possibilities, communities, kinships and images that emerge from the pursuit of pleasure and rigour through dancing. ‘AUTHENTICITY’ : (noun) A dilemma to be inspected, in dance as much as in handbags. The anti-dancer moves towards the […]

Anticolonial Fireman Stripper Communes with (Wronged) Asterion in the Last Days of Fountains, 2019, acrylic (mis-tints) on poly-cotton (discarded quilt cover), 1400 × 2100 mm Manspread, 2020, acrylic (mis-tints) on (discarded) board, 300 × 400 mm Pasiphaë Poster, 2020, acrylic (mis-tints) on (discarded) Masonite, 1220 × 2440 mm Sexualised Workers Mural (‘Real’ vs. Actual Work: […]

SHELTER PRESS · The Weight Of History # # # # # Against classicism and for the possibility of new movements in sound, works from a series of 58 notations with three combs. All images courtesy the artist: *One*, 2020; *Twenty*, 2020; *Fifteen*, 2020; *Seventeen*, 2020, ink on paper, 27.9 x 21 cm, unframed. *14 […]

Sumugan Sivanesan is an anti-disciplinary artist and writer. Often working collaboratively, his interests span minority politics, artist infrastructures and more-than human rights. Sumugan organises with Black Earth, a collective who address interacting issues of race, gender, colonialism and climate justice in Berlin.

If they don’t see the joy in the film at least they’ll see the black Take My Hand, Let’s Dwell In This Space A pair of Black filmmakers. They’ve always been outsiders. At odds with the psychosis of whiteness, their lived experience has always been one of rootlessness and existential absurdity. One of being a […]

To recall is to mine. Language that is used to describe memory may refer to a geological excavation, a process of extracting from the past.[^1] Dig through densely sedimented layers of events, unbury the precious minerals of history. But the past is not constituted by solid ground, does not consist of absolute occurrences. We have […]