Exhibition: Frances Barrett: Meatus Artists: Frances Barrett with Nina Buchanan, Debris Facility Pty Ltd., Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, Del Lumanta and Sione Teumohenga. Commissioning Curator: Annika Kristensen Gallery: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) The external acoustic meatus is the passageway that leads from the outside of the head to the eardrum membrane of each […]

Artists: Anna May Kirk, Naomi Blacklock, Sundari Carmody, Manisha Anjali, Orson Heidrich, Anna Pogossova, Meng-Yu Yan 颜梦钰 Curator: Johanna Bear Gallery: KINGS Artist Run I’m writing on the eve of a waning crescent Moon. As my fingers summon the symbols on the keyboard in a proprioceptive séance of transmission, I’m struck with an overwhelming sense […]

Rationalisation Writing in 1983, George Ritzer argues that McDonald’s exemplified the accelerated rationalisation of the broader society. As constantly reiterated in The Founder,[^1] a biopic focused on Ray Krok’s franchised expansion of the fast-food restaurant, McDonald’s became a ‘symphony of efficiency’. Over the years, Ritzer’s definition of ‘McDonaldization’ as a process that emphasises efficiency, predictability, […]

Mutual debt, debt unpayable, debt unbounded, debt unconsolidated, debt to each other in a study group, to others in a nurses’ room, to others in a barber shop, to others in a squat, a dump, a woods, a bed, an embrace.— Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Today, a brief lull between lockdowns, is for writing.  […]

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 […]

Artists: Grace Ferguson, Emma Phillips, Trevor Santos and Annika Koops Curator: Josephine Mead Coming to Naarm/Melbourne from Western Australia, a trip to the ocean does not feel like an item to tick off a list of things to savour; instead, it became a marginally experienced activity during the warmer months. Victorians have their park picnics, […]

The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognised that it’s fucked up for us. —Fred Moten Under a Burning White Sky As my experience of social life has become less and less about seeking or gaining approval from outside forces, a burden […]

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 […]

For a week now I’ve had a file saved to my computer titled ‘Notes on Hobiennale 2017’. It contains fragments of thoughts, passages copied out from gallery room sheets, quotes from artist and curator talks, headings in caps lock with no writing yet to follow – ECOLOGY, CULT, SITE, WALKING. The list goes on. I […]

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 […]

‘FOR THE CHICKEN = AGAINST THE CHICKEN.’[^1] The art world has been a major economic beneficiary of globalisation. The reduction of the costs of communication and transportation, coupled with the attenuation of barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, and technology has drastically expanded the art market. Economist Joseph Stiglitz, when noting the devastating […]

Amidst the otherwise rather austere mise-en-scène of a winter’s day at the Monash Art Design and Architecture (MADA) campus, the resplendent blue structure that is Gormenghast proves easy to find. Standing more than five metres tall, with a ground area of almost thirty square metres, the two-level wooden frame takes pride of place in the […]

THE NUMBER YOU HAVE REACHED 1–29 May 2016 SUCCESS Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Michael Candy, Antoinette J Citizen, JD Reforma, Andrew Varano, Tim Woodward, Greatest Hits (Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn) Curated by Sarah Werkmeister & Tim Woodward To start with, I get the opening hours wrong, and make the half-hour train trip […]

Anxiety about the possibility of historical honesty runs through many of the portfolio pieces. Daniel Boyd’s lithograph, Untitled (2015), gives the clearest example of how this anxiety has shaped the collection. The work layers and then filters a sequence of associations. Boyd researched his grandfather’s service in the Memorial’s archives and found details about where […]

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 recent exhibitions of Melbourne artists Benjamin Woods, Georgina Criddle and Helen Grogan, consecutively programmed at West Space in 2015, can be seen to crystallise certain tendencies in contemporary local spatial practice.[^1] The current conversation around these projects centres on how they bring to the fore the dynamic but overlooked relations between objects, bodies and […]

Based in Vancouver, Zvonar’s practice regularly engages with metaphysics and mysticism. Notable works include Until Then Then (2006), in which the future of Voyager One and Two was read by psychics and astrologers and then mapped and etched onto two round mirrors which then repeatedly reflected each spaceship’s future into infinity, as well as her […]

The ornate floral display of Drakaea confluens; the hammer orchid mimics the appearance of the female Thynnid wasp in an evocative display. When the male wasp observes this sensuous flower it tries to mate with the orchid and so transfers its pollen. With this intimate inter-species encounter the wasp and the orchid become entangled in […]

One year earlier, in 1925, the Russian socialist theorist and art critic Boris Arvatov wrote that by discovering the underlying ‘relations between people and things, knowing [their] socio-historical substratum’, we could direct the developmental tendencies of material culture.[^2] The Present utilises the Past. The Past shifts the Present. Touches the Future (Card 6): Arvatov wanted […]

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 […]

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 […]