un Projects is based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation; we pay our respects to their Elders past and present.
un Projects

Issue Number: 10.2

Shelley McSpedden

10.2

Shelley McSpedden

Editorial: The Throng

The Throng — a heaving multitude without leader or directive — seems a fittingly nebulous model of collectivity at a time when the structures that once fortified ‘community’ have been swept aside by the deterritorialising processes of globalisation. Under this rubric, this issue of un Magazine examines how our connections with one another are evolving […]

Nathan Gray

Charcoal, chalk and pencil

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing. — Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, 1973 1. Charcoal is a residue, the remaining carbon and ash left behind when a plant or animal has had all of the […]

Zanny Begg

Refuge/e

Australia is an island. The significance of this came home to me when I was talking to a friend who arrived here without papers. He explained to me how trapped he felt by our incongruous geography: ‘I am stuck, I can’t go anywhere.’ The distance from Melbourne to Sydney would be far enough to cross […]

Ross Coulter

Audience 22/1/15 2013–2016; Audience 2/2/15 2013–2016; Audience 1/6/15 2013–2016; Audience 13/7/15 2013–2016; Audience 4/11/15 2013–2016; Audience 27/11/15 2013–2016

Pedro de Almeida

If you invested here: Sydney, SquatSpace and its Tour of Beauty

After eviction SquatSpace became the moniker for an artists’ collective, comprising Bonetto, de Souza, Ihlein and Quick, with Jimmy Sing and Dave Toecutter, that was determined to artistically address issues of housing and autonomy.[^5] Following interventions in urban space, such as unReal Estate (2002) for Newcastle’s This is Not Art festival and SquatFest (2001–10), an […]

Tom Civil

Civil Wall c. 2011

Sumugan Sivanesan

Mass action media: Ende Gelände, Break Free 2016

‘Actions live off the images’ So said one of the plenary speakers at the Lausitz Climate Camp, following the first day of action. On the previous night an action primer video, a short documentary following activists from camp to pit to police van during last year’s Ende Gelände, was screened in the camp’s central circus […]

Sam Wallman

Ununiun

Michelle James

Export quality extended: an exchange with The Office of Culture & Design

I remember walking past the vacant retail space on the corner of Lonsdale and Swanston Streets, quietly charting the course of its transformation. The shop came to be filled, sparingly, with trestle table desks, flat-pack cardboard boxes and rolls of packaging tape. The most salient clue that this store was ready to trade came with […]

Phuong Ngo

A brief history of Hue 2016

A companion video work by Phuong Ngo, My father the people smuggler 2016, can be viewed online as part of un Extended 10.2.

Nick Modrzewski

A crowd of soccer players, a group of lawyers, a band of Malay Muslims

I recently applied for a job as a lawyer and met a new friend, The Ghost of Félix Guattari, The Famous French Philosopher and Psychotherapist Who’s Been Dead for Fourteen Years and is Currently Stuck in a Psychotherapeutic Purgatory. His apparition appeared to me as I attempted to fill out an Application for Employment Form, […]

Laura Castagnini and Rose Gibbs

Restaging the collective: a conversational review of Sharon Hayes’ In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You and Alex Martinis Roe’s Our Future Network

Laura Castagnini : I met Rose Gibbs in December 2015 when I attended a two-day workshop at the Showroom in London entitled, fittingly, Our Future Network. Led by the artist Alex Martinis Roe, our small group of participants experimented with feminist collective strategies by undertaking a series of exercises developed from research into the Milan […]

Elise Routledge

Emile Zile: digital communion

Emile Zile is an artist, performer and filmmaker crafting poetic turns about the relationship between digital media and social conditions. His work provides a penetrating critique of how the manufactured outputs of the mass media and technology industries interact with our bodies, behaviours and feelings. It offers, in the artist’s words, ‘damaged optimism’ for humans […]

Lauren Burrow

Jimmy Nuttall, GINA, and an erotics of loneliness

Jimmy Nuttall’s 2016 short film, GINA, is a reflection on contemporary malaise that borrows its structure as much from the haphazard mode of home movie-making as any historical avant-garde. Shot in Melbourne and its surrounding rural landscape, the video tells an experimental post-breakup narrative of Gina and Jules that begins with a cast of Jim’s […]

Luke Letourneau

Scene, and being seen at Day for Night

At Day for Night all of the artists are not from the same scene. At the 2016 iteration of the festival Stereogamous, artists who have performed in bathhouses and on the international club scene, soundtracked most of the event but also acted as the main act four times across the weekend: The Day for Night […]

Georgina Criddle

‘Nods all around: orientations in recent spatial practice’ — a response

[^1] I remember when it happened. It was sometime between 2010 and 2012. The change took at least a couple of years to implement. We were living in Berlin then, traveling around Europe in the typical itinerant fashion, making manageable works of art and generally having an enjoyable time. My employer, Georgina Criddle, was banging […]

Matthew Taft and Julian R. Murphy

Coq au vin presents Hard on the Heels of… — an ornithological examination of artistic collaboration in a globalised age

‘FOR THE CHICKEN = AGAINST THE CHICKEN.’[^1] The art world has been a major economic beneficiary of globalisation. The reduction of the costs of communication and transportation, coupled with the attenuation of barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, and technology has drastically expanded the art market. Economist Joseph Stiglitz, when noting the devastating […]

Georgia Robenstone

Art holds a high place in my life / Damp: study of an artist at 21

Amidst the otherwise rather austere mise-en-scène of a winter’s day at the Monash Art Design and Architecture (MADA) campus, the resplendent blue structure that is Gormenghast proves easy to find. Standing more than five metres tall, with a ground area of almost thirty square metres, the two-level wooden frame takes pride of place in the […]

Anna Dunnill

THE NUMBER YOU HAVE REACHED

THE NUMBER YOU HAVE REACHED 1–29 May 2016 SUCCESS Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Michael Candy, Antoinette J Citizen, JD Reforma, Andrew Varano, Tim Woodward, Greatest Hits (Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn) Curated by Sarah Werkmeister & Tim Woodward To start with, I get the opening hours wrong, and make the half-hour train trip […]

Nick Terrell

Anzac Centenary Print Portfolio

Anxiety about the possibility of historical honesty runs through many of the portfolio pieces. Daniel Boyd’s lithograph, Untitled (2015), gives the clearest example of how this anxiety has shaped the collection. The work layers and then filters a sequence of associations. Boyd researched his grandfather’s service in the Memorial’s archives and found details about where […]

Anusha Kenny

Interview with Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan, 2016 (full transcript)

Michelle James

Export quality extended: an exchange with The Office of Culture & Design (full transcript)

I remember walking past the vacant retail space on the corner of Lonsdale and Swanston Streets, quietly charting the course of its transformation. The shop came to be filled, sparingly, with trestle table desks, flat-pack cardboard boxes and rolls of packaging tape. The most salient clue that this store was ready to trade came with […]

Nikos Pantazopoulos

Trying to explain Hal Foster’s critique on the failure of minimalism to my brother with fishing line a blue Dior tie, a tree trunk, maroon felt, a yellow block of wood, and a Banksia Coccina whilst two boys are kissing on the news. F11, 1/90, Flash, B for brush… CMYK SWOP coated for editorial 2016