I recently discovered I was born under the malevolent star Algorab. Like most stars observable without high-powered telescopes, its name is ancient, derived from the Arabic meaning “the crow”. This is in reference to its dark glimmer and the gifts of craftiness and subterfuge it is said to lend those born under it. Discovering that […]

“Meet Barbi, your typical suburban housewife”, a hammy voiceover intones in the trailer for Anna Biller’s film Viva (2007). It’s the end of the sexual revolution. Los Angeles, 1972. “She has a loving husband named Rick… a great job… a beautiful home… and everything any woman could possibly hope for. So what is Barbi Smith […]

Carmen-Sibha Keiso visits Alethea Everard in her Melbourne studio/home.

1. Network Spirituality / The year is 2020, 2021 or 2327. / Pre 2020, Heidegger wrote on the necessity for reinvigorating the question of “Being” in metaphysics. He explicated ‘Being’ as the most universal and emptiest of concepts for it defies any attempt at a unanimous definition. I am reminded of the internet since it is also […]

It’s not autofiction / And it’s not fiction / It’s a song / It’s operatic / I’m a Prima Donna / Soprano / The posts are just my songs / And they are / Not real

Sacrifice (halter neck), Aodhan Madden. Even writing feels like complicity these days. Whacking a bit of something congealed on a plate for friends, hypothetical friends and critics isn’t so bad, but there is no escaping the knowledge that our creative secretions are the nectar of our godless god. I keep finding munching negation machines everywhere. […]

Audrey Schmidt: So, firstly, you had to review a sprawling art exhibition that had no curatorial agenda or intentional overarching theme that no one else was able to attend. In how many words again? Cameron Hurst: That’s a dire but accurate description. The VCA graduate show opened for two weeks in December with only..

The Bourgeois is Franco Moretti’s 2013 study of the bourgeois class, its sensibilities and its politics in modern European literature. The subtitle, “Between History and Literature” pretty much describes his method; he’s not interested in collapsing the two terms, history and literature, into one — literary history — but in using literature to get to […]

How do we begin to periodise a slice of time like 2020, a year in which complete cultural hegemony about which everyone was talking non-stop was finally monopolised, albeit not by world communist revolution but the COVID-19 pandemic which has, of the time of writing, resulted in over 1.5 million deaths, 75 million infections and […]

Their beach was known for its riptides and blowholes. Flanked by large headlands on the east and the west, two lifeguards sat on their tower chairs beside each other, staring ahead in silence. James had been fifteen minutes late this morning, so Sandra dragged the flags and the rescue boards out from the shed alone. […]

Burberry posted an advertisement on Instagram for their new Pocket Bag on 27 August captioned “A contrast of reality and fantasy” and featuring Bella Hadid as an Irma Vep type vampiric actress-character. Bella’s hips and shoulders move almost independently from her motionless head, with the uncanny effect of looking like a simulation or deep fake […]

Nasim Aghdam, known as Nasime Sabz, was an American-based Iranian-born artist whose primary M.O. was to promote a veganic lifestyle through propagandist recipes, beauty tips, music, health and fitness. Her parodies of carnivorism, capitalism, sexual promiscuity and general “unhealthiness” included attacks on Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Ray and Leila Forouhar. As a fame-seeker, […]

And on the last day it began to cry, forgetting that it had been acting all along. And it was only in forgetting this that it had been able to sacrifice itself to a childish god. “Thank you for the gift of heartbreak,” it wept, knowing it was only saying this to make itself feel better. But the ruse seemed to work.

1. The framework of a cell is what matters, the details are interchangeable.    A cell capable of replication or death or benignity is capable of memory. The memory of an event that you did not experience can affect your genetic expression. Memory can show itself in many different ways. And instinct is just one of […]

I was lying at the entrance of my mother’s house, a python wrapped around my ankles. It began to curl up towards my face. I froze. “Maybe if I pretend I’m a path instead of another animal I’ll be ok,” I thought. But the snake knew that I was full of blood. It began to […]

My relationship to you is framed within memories of you. Yet it is difficult for me to remember you as you were. I want to remember you, as if I didn’t know you. Perhaps this remembrance will be closer to you than a present memory. In Arabic the word Thikra (plural Thikrayat) translates to memory/ies. However, Thikra contains emotion/s, feeling/s and state/s of affection. Thikra is not an isolated memory. It is not merely the act of retaining impressions and facts. […]

High in the tower, above the forest and the fields, I scour the vague terrain for fires. Always at night. Drones do it during the day. For some reason, the human touch is required after dark. Don’t ask me why. No one tells me anything, except this: ‘Just do the work. Do not question the work.’

You were born and original… don’t die a copy

The very utterance of the term Cancel Culture brings about a cringe; a contortion of the face matched only by the snarls of those who dish out cancellations with tasteless moral vigour. Perhaps the only thing worse than the cancellation revolution is the low hanging fruit of its self-parody.

In an 1844 essay called ‘The Metaphysics of Sexual Love’, Schopenhauer proposes to account for why so many poets and songwriters are inspired by love as the most powerful passion after which their heroes desperately strive no matter what danger might befall themselves, be it Shakespeare’s suicidal couple or Taylor Swift’s Starbucks lovers.

My grandfather loved optical illusions, M. C. Escher in particular. He kept a ready supply of prints to show me when I used to visit as a child, pulling Escher’s Relativity from a drawer for me to study and grinning as if it was a drawing filthier than it was. Leaving school at twelve, his […]

A sleazy take-out joint in Brisbane has a sinister ‘special’ on the menu.

Directed by Arthur Schmidt and Suzanne Hemanoczki

I have hesitated for some time before throwing my hat into this particular ring. This ring is of course the seventh circle of Hell known to the public as the KAWS show at the NGV which officially closed on the unholy date of April the 13th (although the gallery has been shut for some time due to plague conditions).

In 1894 the bubonic plague spread from its rodent reservoir via colonial trade routes, transmitting from Mainland China through Hong Kong and to the rest of the world. Over 20 million people died without account, buried by the heap, and the face of society was irrevocably altered. The extremist caricature of the West as a […]

Recently the Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, repeated the somewhat tired economic ratio that casually links money to mental health. “If your rent represents more than 30 per cent of your income then you are under real stress.”

Gabriella D’Costa, Vava Dudu, Hana Earles, Carmen-Sibha Keiso, Spencer Lai, Nunzio Madden, Liam Osborne, Evelyn Poggioli, Ander Rennick, Victoria Todorov, Michelle Uckotter & ‘Outfitumentary’, a film by K8 Hardy

There is a scene in the 1988 anime film Akira depicting a billboard counting down 147 days until the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, with “just cancel it!” graffitied over the top. On 28 February 2020, this dystopian science fiction became a reality when the hashtag #justcancelit started trending on Twitter, precisely 147 days before the Tokyo […]

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche traces the development of art back to an untamed nature’s “Dionysian” rupture with our anthropic, “Apolline” values and ideas about what is good, true and beautiful. Through anti-heroes like Oedipus and Prometheus rebelling against their lot by claiming the seductive and fire-bearing powers of kings and gods for themselves […]

Greek duo FYTA losing their anarchist edge and beginning a serialized podcast. An interview with Fil Ieropoulos of FYTA about documenta 14, break‐ins, cover‐ups, fascist spectacles and the milieu of ‘political art’.

27th February — 24th March, 2018 at Irene Rose, Melbourne. Photos: Ruben Bull-Milne

Gordon Hookey in his Brisbane studio talking censorship, political art, swastikas, Austikas and ‘Aboriginality victorious’.

‘Nobody’ saw it coming when Schapelle Corby dropped her collaborative single with singer-songwriter Nat Zeleny, ‘Palm Trees,’ over the 2018 new year. As the first packaged artistic output of arguably the most famous smuggler in Australia, who was released from prison in Indonesia only a few months prior, it created shockwaves around the internet and media.

If you were to apply an Anglophone conceptual frame to give an account of Lucreccia Quintanilla’s practice, you could refer to it as an inter/multi-disciplinary art practice. She dwells in multiple fields, as DJ (DJ General Feelings), writer/ researcher (currently a PhD candidate at Monash University), installation artist, a mother, a co-conspirator in interrogations of […]

Amidst the Greek-government debt crisis, documenta 14 in Athens latched onto the rather reductive idea of a ‘legendary Greece’, birthplace of democracy, and pioneer of the southern European culture of anti-systemic politics and rioting. From the Athenian owl motif and logo through to endless coin collections and the Parthenon of Books, there was a dangerously […]

Aries: confidence and self assuredness is what attracted you in the first place and is their ultimate sex appeal. They’re hot and will tell you you are until you reciprocate and stroke their ego. Hard dicks. Short sex. Lots. Taurus: probably relies on their looks and will be lazy if they’re not that into you. […]