‘Queer is, after all, a spatial term, which then gets translated into a sexual term, a term for a twistedsexuality that does not follow a “straight line”… The spatiality of this term is not incidental.’Sara Ahmed, 2006. Queer Phenomenology, 67. In rūḥ al-rūḥ – jan-e janān, Ayman Kaake is twisting. His body, projected onto sheets […]

For the past three years, Nunzio Madden’s paintings have played host to one character and one character only. Musclebound and jaundiced, it is a plain anatomy of disquieting features: its head, bald as an egg and tiny relative to its hypermasculine, double-linebacker shoulders, hangs expressionless above a Ken-smooth crotch. Madden’s recent exhibition at KINGS, titled […]

Tera Echo – Daisy Dale CollierBlak Dot Gallery12 July – 3 August 2025 At the gallery entrance I’m greeted by the exhibition title, Tera Echo, underscored with red ochre dragged across the wall, a handwritten epigraph of Country and kin. Beyond the partition wall, the room is painted black like a night sky turned inside […]

Of Stadiums and Construction Sites (Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent)21 June – 10 August 2025Gertrude Contemporary The videos that A Constructed World (Jacqueline Riva, Geoff Lowe, et al.) made in the mid-00s are considerably more pared down than their earlier and their later ones. There is no speech. The Melbourne-born, Paris-based artist […]

Last November, a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for US $6.24 million. The piece, Comedian (2019) by Maurizio Cattelan, runs in a limited edition of three, the second of which having been sold for much more than its estimated value to Justin Sun, a collector and the founder of the cryptocurrency platform TRON.[1] Sun […]

Housed within Buxton Contemporary, The same crowd never gathers twice is an exhibition with a curious title. It initially provoked me to think of moments when I found myself situated within crowds, organised or not, such as the dinner table, the food court or a tram stop. And how fleeting the configurations of crowds are, […]

Travelling north on the 86 for the group exhibition Five rooms and house rules at Bundoora Homestead Arts Centre, I find myself playing a kind of phrase association to see how frequently I can think of different idiomatic uses of ‘house’ and ‘home’. For the most part, the ‘home’ sayings encircle the same kind of […]

Last month, GPU manufacturer NVIDIA’s share prices tumbled by nine-point-five per cent, representing the greatest loss in market value in one day for any company ever at a loss of 279 billion dollars 1. The GPU is the primary technology that powers AI, and harnessed en masse allows for inference to be conducted at industrial […]

Torsion, Curated by Kyle Weise 9 Dec 2023–27 Jan 2024 Metro Arts, Meanjin/Brisbane In 1993 I was ten years old and wanted for few things except for a pair of Nike Airs. When my classmate, Stephen, intentionally stabbed the point of his compass through the clear window of his red and white Air Max, I […]

In his book The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lasch uncannily predicted the perilous state of the contemporary subject. He anticipated a cultural landscape surplus with images of desire rendering the subject beholden to an amalgamation of preexisting material confronting them through the pervasive mediums of photography and the ever-present wallpaper of screen culture.1 In […]

Somewhere there is a Siren. Beginning with the utterance of a single note,  she listens for the return of her own voice.  She responds with the same note again,  and again, echoing into an endless chorus,  a swarm, a sea, a body. Her voices  fill the room with an ethereal presence,  escaping into the world, […]

In reflecting on the varied approaches to furniture engaged by artists, designers and architects, the cultural and social contribution of furniture is evident. However, architecture’s urge to respond and engage with the modern socio-political conditions has become more present.

Dane MitchellAn Unbroken Surface17 May – 8 June 2024Gertrude Glasshouse When experiencing art or participating in spectacle some say everything has the right to exist. It’s ‘subjective’ one might add. Petrochemicals and synthetic olfactories, stinging nostrils, itchy throats and blinking red eyes. More than a few thousand scientifically scented little paper pine trees. A deeply perverted […]

As we walk into the gallery, Kai tells me it’s Car Wash’s fifth birthday this year — a fact I find difficult to believe. Located in West Melbourne, the abandoned-car-wash-turned-gallery has been the site of countless self-organised exhibitions, gigs and parties, while somehow always evading the scrutiny of local council and building owners (if they […]

On the Jump In – Pepsi® Moments, 2017. Prologue to Soda Jerk’s Hello Dankness, 2022. In a Q&A after Soda Jerk’s screening of Hello Dankness (2022) at the Capitol Cinema for the Melbourne International Film Festival, filmmakers Dan and Dom Angeloro posed the rhetorical question: ‘Can there be satire after Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi®ad?’ Ultimately, Hello […]

FUTURES, Melbourne. never together Lara Chamas, Matilda Davis, Christopher Duncan, Evangeline Riddiford-Graham, Fiona Williams. Curated by Victoria Wynne-Jones. Looking at the appeal or influence of magic and mysticism in aesthetics today, one wonders why? Especially given that — as Mitch Therieau writes in Vibe, Mood, Energy — the language of mysticism emerged in reaction to […]

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 […]

A speculation on speculation, this nonlinear conversation addresses processes of working. It allows for a thematic meander that we hope you can join us on, one perhaps for all the tangential thinkers … Previously, we have moved through moments in sound guided by Assia Djebar’s words on ‘Aphasia,’ ‘Murmur,’ ‘Voice,’ ‘Clamour’ and ‘Whisper’ in Fantasia: […]

Prompted by un Magazine’s General Manager, I attended a screening of Interview With The Vampire at ACMI with an introduction by critic and historian Dr. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. In her introduction, Heller-Nicholas contextualised this queer coded film with the zeitgeist of the 90s and the oeuvre of Anne Rice. She also touched on the apocalyptically bad sequel Queen of […]

Thinking back to my first visit to However Vast the Darkness atJohn Curtin Gallery in March, I now remember that moment as being unusually bookended by the subject of death. In the months prior to seeing the exhibition, death seemed to be a recurring theme in my life; a sequence that I can only describe […]

So far the 2020s have been the decade of the ‘water’ and‘decolonial’ biennial. Everyone’s doing it — bringing togetherIndigenous and non-white artists against the loose themes of‘flows of resistance’ or the like, attempting to make sense in amoment of intersecting and layered crises. Questions aroundinstitutional transformation, curatorial activism, representation,the environment, climate change, equality, and how […]

How can a culture move forward if it does not have access to its past? For Jasmine Togo-Brisby, a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander (ASSI) with ancestral lineage to the Vanuatu islands of Ambae and Santo, artistic constructions of the past create routes and roots to imagine ASSI futurities. Togo-Brisby’s practice recuperates cultural memory to […]

Kaiela Arts Shepparton Indigenous Futurisms YIRRAMBOI, 4-14 May 2023 The rustling soundscape of trees and birds, accompanied by the rich vibration of the yidaki and the flute, transported viewers into the worlds of the Kaiela Arts young creatives in a new community-led project, Indigenous Futurisms. Led by Dixon Patten, Tammy-Lee Atkinson, and Cienan Muir with […]

Gallery: Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery Exhibition: Arthur Jafa, Unrest 7 April – 13 May I am a Wiradjuri guest on the unceded sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nations. This is where I live, work, and am writing from today. I am paying my respects to Elders both past and […]