to carry songs: a diary        and thoughts              about language                    in fragments  : reflections from March Meeting 2025: Sharjah Biennial 16  1. Between 4 February and 10 March 2025, I went to Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab […]

I take my pill every morning and I observe its colour, the same pale blue used in a series of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Loverboy, made between 1989 and 1991. Blue curtains, blue stacks of paper, blue lollies. The title suggests that the works are portraits, yet these monochromes do not depict a figure; instead, […]

Paint pours through a system. Run of the mill white emulsion runs through pipes into canvas, fills canvas, pours out, through a series of neatly cut holes, runs down, is caught, fed into pump, fed into pipes, into canvas, through and round. Natasha Kidd’s Flow and Return (2006) is a cyclical loop of white paint […]

Atlantis Marine Park is an abandoned theme park and the centrepiece of the Yanchep Sun City development. It was built by notorious criminal entrepreneur Alan Bond in the small fishing community of Two Rocks in 1981, sixty-something kilometres north of Boorloo/Perth. Atlantis seems a curious name for a theme park in settler-colonial Australia — for […]

Teik-Kim Pok: I saw this one-liner on the internet — ‘My friend told me she wouldn’t eat beef tongue because it came from a cow’s mouth. So I gave her an egg.’ As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded it was hard to keep up with all the stories of food, both good and bad, that shaped […]

Franz Kafka’s short story ‘The City Coat of Arms’ (1931), begins with a group of people who all agree that it would be a great idea to build a tower. ‘At first all the arrangements for building the Tower of Babel were characterized by fairly good order … perhaps too perfect.’ Arrangements are made for […]

I ride across town early on a Friday morning for a private viewing of Patrick Pound’s new exhibition at STATION Gallery in South Yarra. Private viewings are the only kind of physical viewing in the age of COVID-19 and after weeks of quarantine (in the midst of quarantine) it feels indulgent, luxurious even, to be […]

Sea-brown ships glide on heavy warm air, rising to the top floor of SEVENTH Gallery. On second examination the ship-like qualities are replaced by an answer to a more vital need: thirst. The ship plays a cardinal role in the colonial saga and it seems fitting that such heroic propaganda is undermined by Indigenous craft […]

Curated by: Cristana Napoleone and Emergence Magazine Featuring: Alisha Anderson, Hattie Malloy, Terrain Projects, Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. Nestled amongst the industrial buildings of Fitzroy, Melbourne, lies Trees, a multisensory exhibition focused on the way humans interact with the natural environment. The exhibition provides a welcomed respite from the concreted environs it exists within […]

I suspect the art world thinks I’m ugly — maybe. This is not about a lack of swipes on Tinder or an unreturned call, it’s something else. Well, I’m just going to say it: the thing is, there’s a local photographer that did not approach me at an impressionable age to pose on camera (the […]

Curators: Kathleen Linn and Sarah Hibbs Artists: Xanthe Dobbie, Clare Longley, Loc Nguyen, Nabilah Nordin / Nick Modrzewski, EJ Son and Sophie Takách Nestled amongst the corridors and storage units of Kennards Self Storage in Ultimo, Sydney — on Gadigal and Guring-gai land — lies Potential Space. Like a lung that breathes in and expands, […]

why must a gown either creep or caress & not slip into both These words, rendered delicately in pink and barely visible atop exposed aggregate and polished concrete flooring, graze my soles as I enter Hannah Gartside’s Fantasies at Ararat Gallery TAMA. Autumn Royal’s poetic response references a tag from a vintage nightie that Gartside […]

Curator: Maria Morata Artists: Suzanne Treister, Pinar Yoldas, Lu Yang, Marco Donnarumma, Renaud Marchand, Yvonne Roeb, Alan Warburton For those unfamiliar with the term ‘posthuman’, Maria Morata’s curatorial project Zoextropy. The Posthuman Beauty could suggest a world filled with monstrous dystopic creations. Perhaps one might envision a spectacle, something along the lines of enthusiastic technophilia, or visions of a […]

Artists: Matt Arbuckle, Sean Bailey, Lucia Canuto, Rafaella McDonald, Jahnne Pasco-White, Laura Skerlj Curators: Daine Singer and Laura Couttie In 2009 Maggie Nelson published her cult hit Bluets, a book of prose poetry exploring grief, loss and suffering via meditations on the colour blue. Nelson’s oft quoted text stands as the curatorial and conceptual inspiration […]

Liam O’Brien’s recent screening of Empty Avenues (Best of Season 1) (2018) at Seventh Gallery was staged in a dim room with two armchairs, a wooden coffee table, a lamp and two portable heaters. As visitors entered this fabricated space, they were faced with a second living room, on screen. The set inside the film […]

It seems as though we are all creative now. The University hosts an event after the Christchurch terror attacks. The speaker offers ‘creative solutions’ to violence. My mind swivels. What does that even mean? A wry smile from across the table: yarn bombing? Let’s give that one a miss, eh? This article is a bit […]

An orchid edges its leaves up through the layers of peat moss, bark, nutrient rich soil, to take its first breaths in the fragrant air of the farm. Or, an orchid raises its first leaves up through the display screen, pushing through streams of data into pungent technicolour downloads. At AIRspace Projects, an orchid breathes […]

Artists: Hans Baldung Grien, Monika Behrens and Rochelle Haley, Naomi Blacklock, Eric Bridgeman, Giovanni Bendetto Castiglione, Albrecht Dürer, Mikala Dwyer, Emily Hunt, Clare Milledge, Judith Wright Witchcraft is in. From Lorde to YouTube sage-burning tutorials, Wicca and ritual have found a new home in contemporary culture, especially within online communities. Five decades ago, second-wave feminist […]

I heard a story on the radio the other day about a man who had had a medical device, a pump, implanted under his skin. After some time the pump broke and began beeping to indicate its malfunction. The device was not removed and the man lived with the beep beep beep for years. I […]

In a context of extreme political turns, climate catastrophe and renewed militouristic exploitation of lands and waters first known in kinship by First Nations across the Great Ocean, a number of works presented in the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9) at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) provide […]

Recently I went to see Carly Fischer’s I feel the earth move under my feet (2018) in the group show Groundwork at Maribyrnong’s Living Museum of the West Visitor Centre. The Museum of the West is a small social history museum, run by dedicated amateurs devoted to Maribyrnong’s past, first as a place where armaments […]

Artists: John Akomfrah (Ghana/UK), Fernando Arias (Colombia), Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola), Runo Lagomarsino (Sweden/Brazil), Sarah Munro (Aotearoa, NZ), Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria/Belgium), Siliga David Setoga (Aotearoa, NZ), Jasmine Togo-Brisby (Australia/Aotearoa, NZ), Jian Jun Xi (China) Curator: Gabriela Salgado Under what conditions does the Global South become relevant? Originally conceived to replace and […]

Artists: Natalie Ball (Modoc, Klamath, Black), Hannah Brontë (Yaegel), Bracken Hanuse Corlett (Wuikinuxv, Klahoose), Chantal Fraser (Sāmoa), Lisa Hilli (Gunantuna), Carol McGregor (Wathaurung, Scottish), Ahilapalapa Rands (Kanaka Maoli, iTaukei Viti, Pākehā), and T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss (Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, Stó:lō, Irish, Métis, Kanaka Maoli, Swiss) Curators: Freja Carmichael (Quandamooka), Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini Northern […]