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Proposals are due by 11:59pm AEST Wednesday 27th May 2026. Late or incomplete submissions may not be considered.
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The title of this issue is foremostly a reference to the three-part HBO television series, The Leftovers (2014-17) adapted from a novel by Tom Perotta, where roughly 2% of the world’s population suddenly and inexplicably disappear. The main characters chart a course through a world being re-shaped by new but familiar responses to collective trauma — nihilistic cults, charismatic leaders and conspiracy theories; self-help, self-diagnosis, and self-harm; mystical visions and psychosis; experimental therapies, sham technological panaceas and calls to return to order. A major arc of the third series plots a journey into ‘Aboriginal Australia’, with a knowing performance by the late David Gulpilil, who calms down one of the central characters’ fantastical projections onto Indigenous people as holding prophetic answers to humanities distress. The part is almost a perfect inversion of Gulpilil’s role in Peter Weir’s dystopian The Last Wave (1977). Instead of the white guy saviour being able to tap into Indigenous spiritual power, the old man is simply given some much needed care and brought back down to earth.
This is what it humbly means to occupy a leftover position — neither a return to mythical, irrecoverable ‘origins’, nor a form of dismantling the old and starting over — but a kind of working with what you’ve got. Maybe I am oddly nostalgic for this middlebrow ‘prestige tv’ era artefact as a melodramatic yet sincere grappling with a world that was just then on the brink of the post-truth era and pre-pandemic, imagining an ‘event’ that would fragment the world into ever finer-grained more recalcitrant communities, gathered around personal pathology or global conspiracy.
By this time, many of the well-worn artistic approaches to working with traces of loss and repressed history and trauma — institutional critique within museums, postcolonial poetics, the artist as historian or archivist, re-enactment (Schneider) — had already perhaps started to feel sombre and outpaced by the great weirding of the world and its intensified collapsing of shared senses of reality (namely, because, the old institutions now caricatured themselves). Like a good film noir, The Leftovers refuses a satisfying solution to its central mystery; humbles the egos and personal ‘copes’ of its protagonists; and throws everyone back into the tangled mess of an unreal world, scrambling to hold the threads of the past.
In terms of the leftovers to be explored in this issue: artistically and theoretically, what are we drawing from to get us through another day? What are the strange returns and re-runs and do they help us keep pace with the world? Have we made something worth consuming again or have we just gotten lazy? What are cogent modes of refusal and what are retreats? How do we chaotically hold together without projection, control, or neo-primitivism? Of relevance might be theories and practices of relational autonomy and self-determination; undercommons (Moten and Harney), survivance (Vizenor), fugitivity, adjacency (Campt). Maybe back to Derrida yet again — remnants, remainder, trace. I’ve started to mull over the phrase inhabiting the trace for a while now — because it speaks to a way of living and grappling with traces of the past (absent-presences) as dynamic everyday surplus forces rather than as nostalgic, lost, or repressed objects. What is ours to pick-up and share and what tastes good tomorrow?
— Dr Jessyca Hutchens
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About the guest editor:
Dr Jessyca Hutchens is a Palyku woman living and working on Noongar boodja. She is a Lecturer at the School of Indigenous Studies and Co-Director of the Berndt Museum, at the University of Western Australia. Jessyca is an art historian, curator, and writer who has previously held positions as the Curator at the Berndt Museum, a Curatorial Fellow at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia, the Curatorial Assistant to the Artistic Director for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, and as a Lecturer in Global Art History at the University of Birmingham. She is on the Editorial Advisory Committee forArtlink and is a founding editor of an online journal of artistic research, oarplatform.com(.)
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Info about submitting to un Magazine:
We are seeking all kinds of submissions from arts criticism essays, artist pages, interviews, artist profiles, exhibition reviews,
This application form is your proposal of what you’d like to contribute to un Magazine 20.2: Leftovers.
Here you will be asked to submit: i. a short pitch, ii. a contributor bio, and iii. examples of previous work.
Timeline: If your application is successful you will have around approx. 6 weeks turnaround to produce your final contribution for publication, and it is expected that you are prompt for the timeline of our print production. The issue will be released in late 2026.
Who can apply: All are encouraged to apply. un Projects is supported by Creative Australia and prioritises proposals from applicants based in Australia. Additional mentorship support from our editorial committee may be available for emerging contributors who request it and feel they may need some more support.
Payment: All contributors to un Magazine are paid.
If you’re unsure what to submit, familiarising yourself with un Magazine is a great way to start!
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un Projects publishes writing that emerges from art making, providing an independent platform for critical discussions about local artistic practice.
With a focus on artists, writers and independent practice, un Projects publishes essays, artists’ work and reviews, in print and online. Our flagship publication is un Magazine which was founded in 2004 by Melbourne artist Lily Hibberd. un Projects was established in 2008 to ensure the ongoing publication of un Magazine and develop further art writing initiatives.
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For inquiries regarding un Magazine applications please contact un General Manager, Audrey Jo Pfister, at [email protected]
Proposals are due by 11:59pm AEST [Melbourne/Sydney time] Wednesday 27th May 2026.
Late or incomplete submissions may not be considered.