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 […]

I am looking for the body, my body, which exists outside its patriarchal definitions. Of course that is not possible. But who is any longer interested in the possible?’[^1] —Kathy Acker Recent judicial impositions on access to abortion and self-determination in Ireland and Ohio has seen the reduction of the subject’s agency over her own […]

‘Google has created a monopoly in which every click produces value for the company. The next stage will be the conquest and appropriation of the ever-more-scarce non-clicks and user downtime as a value asset.’[^1] What you are about to undertake is a special type of guided meditation to help explore the issues you’ve been facing. […]

A year after Society ended—which to clarify for readers thinking that they missed some cataclysmic end to life as we know it, I am referring to an independent curatorial program that I ran in Sydney[^1]—I found myself on residence as an associate curator at the Amsterdam-based contemporary arts organisation If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t […]

The relationship between society and image-production was explored in The Form That Accommodates The Mess, a program of four films curated by OtherFilm in collaboration with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Included were Robin Laurie and Margot Nash’s We Aim to Please (1976), Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder […]

As the clock struck midnight, a Witch appeared in the National Gallery of Victoria out of a cloud of dense, black fog. It was 4am. Fumbling with its robes and black pointed hat, a bottle of Flintstone-shaped multi­vitamins tumbled from a concealed pocket onto the floor and scattered about the space. On all fours, Witch […]

Twenty years ago I was a University student fifteen years ago I was a Bachelor of Arts ten years ago I was an art writer & friend of artists two years ago I was a feminist…Now I am absolutely nothing.[^1] Chances are you truly understand the chronological progression this straightforward piece of poetry takes to […]

At the annual beekeepers fair in Berlin’s Prinzessinnengarten, one Imkerin[^1] describes the honey at her stall as ‘a gift from the bees’.She tells us how she asks her bees for permission to take their honey, what most bee­keepers call ‘robbing the hive’, and they agree as long as she passes it on to others. She […]

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycho­linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. The following transcript is drawn from a conversation between Remie Cibis, Georgina Criddle, Tamsin Green and Rosina Prestia following the conference Topologies of Sexual Difference, hosted by the Luce Irigaray Circle, in The Communication, Politics and Culture Research Centre at […]

let me talk you through this scenestraightwe could pretend it’s a bush dancebut reallyI’m at this bar / wherebodies mill by bricksand blue squares split the roomsitting sola on a black barstoolan egg on a nailno—hugging hello, goodbye, to friendswho have flown in from afar who will now fly outbyeand I’m having an ok timethey […]

I got some St Tropez gradual tan moisturiser for free in a magazine; I bought the magazine for the moisturiser. I’ve used it twice so far on my legs, trying to be careful and even, but already today I noticed a blobby stain of tan has appeared on my ankle. I must be doing something […]

As in previous work by Nikos Pantazopolous, the installation of photographs in Wearing negotiates the symbolic and semiotic connections between public and private sexuality. The permeability of erotic experience within and around architecture is explored through a language of ‘place’ as defined by usage, coded and clandestine, modern and hist­orical. Where projects such as OMIA […]

The role that difference has played diachronically across various eras of feminist organisation presents us with this same ethos of contradiction. Where in the eighteenth century difference between the sexes was viewed as a limiting agency that sought to subordinate and control women’s aspirations, gendered difference became a liberating force for women of the nineteenth […]

‘Inside every cell is a system beyond your own capacity for mathematics.’ —Eating and Speaking Aodhan MaddenReading each letter and word (cell) of your poems could be described as a systematic unsettling of the space between the reader and their world. What do you hope one can learn from (reorienting) the practice of reading? Astrid […]

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 […]