Wart is a Sydney-based performance artist, painter, illustrator and cartoonist who has been exhibiting and performing in Australia since the early 1980s. Here is documentation from two works from Wart’s archive: Mo-bile (Carriageworks, 2007) and In between breaths (Performance Space, 2006) This is a companion piece to Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s article ‘Mental Olympics: in between […]

Emile Zile is an artist, performer and filmmaker crafting poetic turns about the relationship between digital media and social conditions. His work provides a penetrating critique of how the manufactured outputs of the mass media and technology industries interact with our bodies, behaviours and feelings. It offers, in the artist’s words, ‘damaged optimism’ for humans […]

At Day for Night all of the artists are not from the same scene. At the 2016 iteration of the festival Stereogamous, artists who have performed in bathhouses and on the international club scene, soundtracked most of the event but also acted as the main act four times across the weekend: The Day for Night […]

To throw around polyphony with an unstructured multiplicity and plurality is now a commonplace. Ideas of fluctuating disunity and rhizomatic structures clumsily circulate around the contemporary dialogue, resembling what some now terrifyingly call a ‘classic’ postmodernism. Yet there is more to say about polyphony than this now-normalised discourse, and Polyphonic Social stresses this shifting rhetoric. […]

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 […]

In the tradition of OSW, the exhibition was comprised of a range of events, sculptural installations, performances and outdoor works that unravelled over various locations and times and was almost impossible to take in in its entirety. This curatorial approach encouraged recurring visits to the show, hunting for works across the Convent’s grounds and to […]

Meret Oppenheim made her furry-lined teacup on a whim. She made it quickly when she was young, then she spent a large part of the rest of her career trying to replicate its triumph. She was forever a slave to that early object’s success. We saw David Byrne sing Burning Down the House some years […]

Public Share is a New Zealand–based collective of seven artists (Monique Redmond, Harriet Stockman, Kelsey Stankovich, Deborah Rundle, Mark Schroder, Joe Prisk and, until recently, Kirsten Dryburgh) founded in 2014. Their work involves nuanced conversations embedded in acts of making and sharing. With a keen interest in participatory happenings, Public Share’s work has occupied allotted […]

It’s early October and I’ve come to Bétonsalon Centre for Art and Research for the opening of Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster. Three months since arriving in Paris, disaster is already decidedly in the air. The United Nations COP21 climate change talks (expected by most to be its own car crash of performative political inaction) are not […]

Before a wall of mirrors, five performers dance for their reflections. The room heaves with bodies and music pumps through the crowd like a pulse. The audience beyond the mirrors can’t see the performers, only screens transmitting a live-feed of the performance just out of sight. They cheer anyway. Sydney-based performance artist Bhenji-Ra’s practice foregrounds […]

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 […]

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 […]

Taking Form, a recent exhibition in the contemporary Project Space at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), presented six new works by Agatha Gothe-Snape and Sriwhana Spong, meditating the intersections between dance, choreography and language. Curated by Anneke Jaspers, the exhibition established a dialogue between the past and the present, exploring traces of […]