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 […]

The fact is that MUMA exists as an institution, and they do put on shows. So the question is, what should be in the shows that they put on? I don’t think everyone should just stop making art and get into activism. But by the same token, no one should feel that enough has been […]

Alana Hunt : You’ve worked extensively with Aboriginal art at major institutions in Australia, including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Gallery of Australia and, presently, in the New Museum Project at the Western Australian Museum. During this time you have maintained an ongoing focus on Indigenous objects in your work as a […]

Sophia Dacy-Cole interviews artist and theorist Erin Manning on her keynote ‘For a Pragmatics of the Useless’ at the Transversal Matters conference, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, September 2015. SDC : un 10.1 focuses on Russian theorist Boris Aratov’s concept of the co-worker: the idea that objects are not merely inert, but have some […]

The conversation that follows is woven together from a series of emails and Skypes between Ariel Goldberg and myself. Goldberg’s first book of poetry The Photographer was recently published by Roof Books, New York. They are also curate Friday Nights at the Poetry Project in New York City. Our discussion centres on the forthcoming publication […]

BETH CAIRD: Could you please introduce your practice to us, a largely new Australian audience, in the lead up to your show at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane? PATRICK STAFF: I suppose I am preoccupied at the moment with thinking about how particular bodies are presented, produced, represented and assessed. I am […]

‘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 […]

Mella Jaarsma and Nindityo Adipurnomo are artists and the Yogyakarta-based directors of Cemeti Art House, the art space they founded in 1988 in the front room of their house. Their aim for Cemeti was to exhibit new work and function as an information centre that promoted Indonesian artists over the longer term. Twenty-five years on, […]

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 […]

Mentioned in the same breath as anyone from Christian Marclay to David Shea and Grandmaster Flash, British avant-garde turntablist Philip Jeck has built an oeuvre via the act of pillaging, appropriating and manipulating a record collection that traverses a vast span of music history. But Jeck’s approach to records—and the devices he uses to extract […]

Our conversation took place on Thursday 25 April 2013. Present were Elvis Richardson (artist, former director of Death Be Kind and editor of online blog CoUNTess), Helen Grogan (artist, curator, co-director of art space and curatorial project Open Archive) and Eugenia Lim (artist, co-director of Channels video art festival). The trio discussed tactics for negotiating […]

Tom Ellard is a ‘musician’—a term he describes as ‘an old descriptor for a sound/video/interactive artist’. While it is hard to establish all aspects of his work briefly, Ellard is best known as founding member of electronic and industrial band Severed Heads (officially active from 1979 to 2008). For those wondering, think tape loops, discordant […]