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 […]

It feels too easy to write the abject — I puke all over myself and my organs fall out and I shit my pants and everything that was inside is out now. That’s writing the abject though, not writing about it. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything in the above example, it simply operates and exists. […]

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 […]

Jungku Ngambala Ngarrur Ngarrumba Yarkijina Yurrngumba(We sit peacefully in our lands forever) — Garrwa Yanyuwa Elder Nancy McDinny In 2020 pandemic conditions created an extreme sense of isolation and containment. The city slowed down to lockdown pace here on unceded Gadigal lands as the terror of COVID-19 began to unravel through all sorts of media […]

Artists: Amrita Hepi, Miko Revereza, Talia Smith and Leyla Stevens Curator: Josephine Mead The existence and placement of the punctuation in the title the place one lives., is subtly suggestive of the screening’s handling of its central theme of home. By its nature, the full stop indicates a cessation or state of completion. However, the […]

Following the contours of my body an archive an assembly of history’s traces left in me. The impression is hazy ill defined. The act of tracing is precarious … Using what little is known the tools at my disposal a cloudy tongue the fuzzy logic of Google’s algorithm Gradually unearthing a picture my ancestor’s movements […]

Artist: Nunzio Madden Curator: Olivia Koh Nunzio Madden’s video work, Bush Doof (2019) begins with a voicemail. The call contains the details of an accident – a child has fallen off the back of a tractor driven by their dad. The caller, the dad, is ringing to apologise and tells the artist, the child who […]

Super(im)position, enduring (non-place) can be watched in full here. Zoomed out consciousness Virtual meetings Uncertainty or indeterminacy? Lockdown as a pause A gap year perhaps Retention of a mirage with a red eye Loss of smell and touch I insist on zooming in and eyeing closer A ‘spiritual catastrophe’?[^1] There is no escape from this […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

This essay was written as part of a residency at Art Works’ Minor Works Building in Adelaide from April-August 2018. ART WORKS is an initiative delivered by Guildhouse in partnership with the City of Adelaide at the Minor Works Building. To participate in an understanding of collaboration that has appeared within this site, and of […]

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 […]

Curator Tirdad Zolghadr once remarked that if you are working class in the arts you feel inadequate, and if you are middle class you feel embarrassed.[^1] Provocateur that he is, Zolghadr’s passing comment hits a nerve. Why is class so hard to talk about? Why is it that with such a sophisticated vocabulary on racial […]

SORRY FOR BEING GRUMPY Standing alone in Te Puno O Waiwhetū (Christchurch Art Gallery), I snapped this detail from Marie Shannon’s work and sent it somebody (text accompaniment: ‘NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL: art’). It was meant to be a kind of witty apology – stealing someone else’s words to make light of the kind […]

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 […]

Artists: DUDSAPCE with Lou Hubbard, Katie West, Kim Donaldson, Makiko Yamamoto, Sean Dockray & Benjamin Forster, Simone Slee and Yuval Rosinger (Pee Pee and Poo Poo Gallery) In the exhibition Dissident Assemblies KINGS Artist-Run have taken a self-reflexive approach to celebrate the fifteenth year of the organisation, inviting artists to ‘work within and respond to […]

Artists: Laresa Kosloff, Foster and Berean, Stuart Ringholt and David Rosetzky Curator: Chelsea Hopper In recent years, the residency has taken on new and greater proportions as a rite of passage for artists. Next to the biennale, it encapsulates the ripest combination of travel and art, the height of cultural tourism. Of the various residencies […]

Diana Baker-Smith : When I think about collaboration, I think about friendship. I think about our first collaborations at art school well over a decade ago, when we used to do performances in clubs and at warehouse parties. I think about conversations over kitchen tables, sharing beds in regional towns and handmade birthday cards. Making […]

On my way to Cool Change Contemporary I stopped into Uniqlo, which had three days prior opened a two-storey shopfront in Perth’s Murray Street Mall. On Thursday there had been a queue, and there was still a dense bustle of people fondling linens and poly-cotton, apologising or not for the accidental sharp contact of elbows. […]

Artists: Emily Parsons-Lord X Laure Prouvost Sense is something universally experienced and yet so intimately felt it’s often impossible to describe. To touch skin, taste fresh fruit, hear a whisper vibrate in your ear, to see and smell the threatening beauty of billowing smoke is at once familiar and transformative. It is through our perpetually […]

Toponymic Interventions #1 (Gold Coast, place: Boykambil) 2013, still from Video Projection. Image courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Adric Watson

Lately I’ve started driving around Tasmania again, making another film. Since 2009 I’ve made twenty-four of them, I can’t stop. Short, long, some seem unwatchable, nevertheless they record and become a record, a counter to so much that seems missing. They are my memory work. Sometimes it is hard to start, to reverse out of […]