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, present and emerging.
un Projects

Tag: Gertrude Contemporary

Trent Crawford and Stanton Cornish-Ward

In A World Full Of Angels [if you can’t find one, be one]

The following texts and filmic references were instrumental in the creation of In a World Full of Angels (2022), a short film commissioned by Gertrude Contemporary that is currently available to view online as part of their Digital Commissions program. Channelled by the film’s main character, a pilgrim skydiver, these texts and filmic references have […]

Thomas Ragnar

Mouthing: Octopus 19: Ventriloquy

Exhibiting artistsCeri Hann, Danielle Freakley, Eric Demetriou, Gabriella D’Costa, Jacqui Shelton (with Alice Heyward and Megan Payne), Jake Moore, Makiko Yamamoto, Mel Deerson and Briony Galligan, MP Hopkins, Simon Zoric and Steven Rhall. PerformancesAsh Kilmartin, James Rushford and Rachel Yezbick, Jacqui Shelton (with Alice Heyward and Megan Payne) Jake Moore, Kate Brown, Mel Deerson (with […]

Katie West

OCTOPUS 18: Mother Tongue

Curator: Kimberley Moulton Artists: Joi Arcand (Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, Canada), Megan Cope (Quandamooka), Kirsten Lyttle ( Waikato, Tainui A Whiro, Ngaati Tahinga, NZ (Melbourne based)), Vicki Couzens (Kirrae Wurrong), Lisa Hilli (Makurategete Vunatarai (clan) Tolai / Gunantuna people of Papua New Guinea) and Nakia Cadd. If you have ever had the experience of sitting […]

Lauren Burrow and Tristen Harwood

Forgetting Architecture and the new Aboriginal Kitsch

Between the subjugation and indifference of colonial governance, Ngurungaeta, William Barak leads the Wurundjeri people in a sustained decolonising movement, seeking land-rights at Coranderrk. They petition ministers, writing letters and walking to Melbourne to protest directly to the Premier. is goes on in the face of dispossession. And, in 1881 there is a rupture in […]

Alistair Baldwin

Australian art is already funny — we just need to add a laugh track

But that’s work that I’m doing. And if taking art out of an art gallery is a necessary step for me to enjoy myself, then surely that speaks more to a problem with galleries than anything else? What can art spaces actively do to meet us halfway? Certainly, the proper curation of comedy is a […]

Katie West

Octopus 17: Forever Transformed

Artists: Tony Albert, Rushdi Anwar, Sophie Cassar, Tabita Rezaria and Liz Linden. Curators: Georgie Meagher. Is it a measure of resilience to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick biosphere?[^1] Within a biosphere subject to an entanglement of hyperobjects – white supremacy, patriarchy and climate change, just to name a few – finding ways to […]

Tristen Harwood

Love and decolonisation in actu

Helen Hughes

Peoples’ plumbing: objects and pipes in Sean Peoples’ recent work

Whilst outwardly concerned with typologies of contemporary kitsch, Peoples’ practice is actually based in extensive research. He has racked up hours studying local history in the Belgrave Library, and even more on the internet, piecing together information about local alien and UFO sightings. The most famous local UFO sighting, indeed one of the most renowned […]

Lauren Burrow

When I write I know that I am drawing

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 […]

Thomas Jeppe

In time: emotional professionalism

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 […]