Olga Svyatova is an artist from Russia, now based in Eora/Sydney. In their practice they explore complex links between memory, relationships and identity.

Critical Dias : How do we start? Maybe we can talk about the last two years, in all of our lives! In the book Reinscriptions (2017) that we’ve just published, there are two main texts that we’ve been writing over the past two years, when concerns about machine learning and algorithmic tech and data have […]

**An ellipsis is a figure of return that isn’t symmetrical*** ‘“To live elliptically” is to ask a question rather than formulate an answer; a “shrug” is a rhetorical response to a non-rhetorical question of the body – an embodied letting go of future promises in favor of life in the durative present’.[^1] — Darren Byler […]

The broad thematic parameters of labour, sex and the relationship between the two, place the group exhibition ‘Putting Out’ at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in a position to explore how bodies are constituted and governed by sex-gender regimes under the constellation of late global capitalism. In ‘Putting Out’ this wide scope has resulted in an exhibition […]

OLD PEOPLE 2018; NEW PEOPLE 2018; DUE WEST 2018; RUN DEEP 2018; all digital images

watercolour on paper

I recently went travelling to see a 13th century mosaic of Jonah being eaten by a whale (that bible story) in a church in Italy. I was away for nearly two months, visiting museums, galleries, churches, looking at medieval manuscripts, reading Moby Dick… mostly underwater themed, I guess. I was on a sea voyage. The […]

I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals. Brigitte Bardot I have not always loved dogs. I used to only love art. That was my main love. But things changed when I met Farnsworth. Farnsworth My partner Matt and I had driven up […]

At the heart of the increasingly gentrified East Brunswick sits the artist-run gallery Punk Café, a name that makes a considered link between punk and the Australian middle class — exemplified by ‘café culture’. Like many of its contemporaries employing the language and aesthetic of punk antiestablishmentarianism, such as Info-Punkt (GE), Punk Café features a […]

The deep clap of bronze against bronze reverberates over a stretch of space. Areas can be observed to stir, inhabitants rustled by the tongue’s shudder cast through the air. Even if this movement is not perceived aurally, it registers as an attunement of bodies. The narrator makes a low, thick noise — indecipherable. Morning time. […]

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 […]

(top) To propose a petroleum jelly advertisement or campaign(movement, camouflage, etc.) (bottom) To propose a petroleum jelly advertisement or campaign(colour, clothing, etc.)

Emotion TJ : Being mindful to sidestep sentimentality, tell me about how emotion comes into this. Because I think it is something of a cornerstone. RC : I was planning an essay about this show called ‘The Exhibition as Catharsis’. This is why I’m a bad curator on a few levels, I am a free-association […]