By Andrew Brooks — 7 February, 2020
This is part two of an extended review considering Vernon Ah Kee’s The Island at Campbelltown Arts Centre. You can read part one here. At the centre of Vernon Ah Kee’s exhibition are two multiple channel video works—one old and one new—that bring into sharp relief how central policing and detention are to the preservation of…
By Andrew Brooks — 5 February, 2020
This is part one of an extended review considering Vernon Ah Kee’s The Island at Campbelltown Arts Centre. ‘That’s not an accident.’ Lex Wotton ‘Settlers always think they’re defending themselves.’ Fred Moten The ‘island’ continent often referred to as Australia is underpinned by a carceral imagination. A national mythology casts settlers as a bunch of…
By Laura La Rosa — 18 December, 2019
Laura La Rosa is Running Dog’s inaugural First Nations Emerging Critic—this is the second of three pieces to be published over a period of four months. You can read Laura’s first piece here. My friend Sophie stopped shaving her legs. It was hardly revolutionary, but men did stare. I saw it for myself. We worked on…
By Audrey Pfister & Eleanor Zurowski — 13 December, 2019
We started writing this piece a month ago on the Gadigal land of the Eora Nation, in a week where over seventy fires burned across (so called) New South Wales. We would like to extend our gratitude and acknowledgement to the insects, animals, plant life, waters, people and bodies of knowledge that have cared for…
By Neha Kale — 15 November, 2019
1. A Saturday evening at Carriageworks. A trestle table topped with gin bottles. Friends huddle in neon jumpsuits. Their murmurs bounce off the walls of the old railway yard, recreating the push-pull anxiety of walking into a high-school disco before it starts. Chicks on Speed’s Alex Murray-Leslie appears on stage, cocooned in a cloud of…
By Fiona McGregor — 8 November, 2019
I have to start with the best: Betty Grumble’s Unshame Machine, in which she did a record 1000 cunt prints on a machine resembling a lat pulldown, accompanied by three of the finest new performers in that ever-evolving organism we loosely term the Sydney queer underground. Stelly G, whom many know from hosting at the…
By Michael Sun — 6 November, 2019
Watching Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), I am reminded of another film: Vanilla Sky (2001). I have never seen it, but I have read the Wikipedia summary many times, often in periods of procrastination, or late at night, when the only thing that will quell my anxiety is the mental image of…
By Marcus Whale — 1 November, 2019
Partway through Body of Knowledge, Samara Hersch’s new performance for Liveworks, an attendee’s phone goes off. Except, it’s not exactly their phone, but one assigned to them—a smartphone. In fact, each of the dozen-or-so audience members has been assigned a device, and by the time it’s my turn to participate, almost everyone has a phone…
By Jane O'Sullivan — 18 October, 2019
You know that feeling, when you’re falling asleep, but not quite there yet. You see things, but they’re not quite dreams, not yet. Your sense of your body’s boundaries starts to flicker. You’re big, you’re small, one limb stretches like blutac then it snaps back. What a curious feeling, as Alice would say. I must…
By Chloe Watfern — 16 October, 2019
The social organism is a scribbled line. It’s a line passed from hand to hand across a big sheet of paper. It means nothing and everything. Deep in the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), behind the double glass doors of the National Centre for Creative Learning, a man is drawing a rocket. The rocket is…