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 Hannah Jenkins — 26 July, 2019
There is nothing as invisible as a monument. A statue casts the dead into oblivion. Memory fails and the ritual of building a statue for the sake of having a statue takes over. Drift past these anonymous soldiers, instead, crawl inside soft monuments and remember—remember…
By Barnaby Smith — 10 April, 2019
For Lawrence English, sound is seeing. Or to put it more accurately, his work is predicated on the belief that analysing, repurposing, and even distorting sound can reveal hidden or obscured patterns behind cultural phenomena. Sound is a tool for searching. This thinking has always informed his varied (and consistently collaborative) career as an avant-garde…
By Eleanor Zurowski — 26 March, 2019
This is a sonic response to Connie Anthes and Julia Bavyka’s exhibition Soft Infrastructure at Firstdraft and is best listened to with headphones. The exhibition considered how to ‘actively dismantle’ or ‘think away’ from the institution. Felt, as a material, is formed by ‘matting, condensing and pressing’ through ‘applying heat, moisture and friction to entangle…
By Vanessa Berry — 22 February, 2019
This text is in dialogue with the exhibition Autumn Almanac at KNULP, and is the next instalment in RD’s feature series of paratextual responses. Imagine a library as wide as it is tall, as deep as it is wide, with narrow corridors in between the shelves, all of which are packed tightly with books. This was…
By Dr. Jessica Olivieri — 20 February, 2019
Megan Monte and Josephine Skinner mark one year at the helm of Cement Fondu with The Ropes, an exhibition that brings together the work of First Nations artist/choreographer/performer Amrita Hepi and American conceptual artist/philosopher Adrian Piper. Alongside The Ropes is an exhibition of contemporary woven sculpture by the Yirran Miigaydhu Weavers. Placing these three practices…
By Naomi Riddle — 2 November, 2018
The website for the Singaporean cultural park Haw Par Villa (formerly known as the Tiger Balm Garden) proclaims that the park is a ‘treasure trove of Asian culture, history, philosophy and religion—quirky yet enlightening, at the same time.’ Built in 1937 by Aw Boon Haw, a millionaire philanthropist who marketed Tiger Balm ointment to the…
By Matthew Crookes — 15 August, 2018
The Ghosts of Nothing / In Memory of Johnny B. Goode is the culmination of a four-year collaborative project featuring the eponymous (and fictive) rock group comprising Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre. A visually rich, multi-layered presentation, it initially existed as a ‘rock opera of expanded cover versions’. At The Lock-Up Gallery in Newcastle, the…
By Soo-Min Shim — 8 August, 2018
Author’s note: CW—racism, assault, rape This month, I walked into the University of Sydney and was greeted by angry black scrawls of graffiti on the bus stops: ‘No More G**ks’. I immediately recoiled from a caricature of an Asian face with slanted eyes. A ‘Stop the Asian Invasion’ tag was found on three different…
By Mariam Arcilla — 27 July, 2018
How do you conduct a search party for a phantom actress? Darren Sylvester’s solo show, Out of Life, now on view at Sullivan+Strumpf, is a speculative narrative on mortality, nostalgia and magic, orbiting around a 1970s-era space-suit Sylvester discovered at a Hollywood costumes auction. Metallic and radiant, with moon-grey sleeves and croissant-puff shoulder pads, its…