Category: … reviews
Then the Letting Go
Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight Aaron Aryadharma Matheson 23 May – 15 June 2024 Liverpool St. Gallery, Sydney [First published in 2024 as catalogue essay for Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight, Liverpool St. Gallery] Monday mid-morning and we’re at church. It’s a compact old one, on top of a hill in a leafier pocket…
The Disappearance of the Sea and its Fantasmatic Recovery in Berlin, of all places!
[Originally published in Dear un 22/2/18] I’m looking through a tiny window at the silvery surface of the sea roughly 10,000 metres below. I don’t know where I am, or which ocean this is. After five straight days of lectures, workshops, panels, exhibitions and performances at Berlin’s transmediale festival, I…
documenta 14: art of the (im)possible
[Originally published 2017 in Broadsheet Journal 46.2] The fourteenth edition of documenta opened for the first time in Athens this April, two months ahead of a second opening in its customary home of Kassel, Germany. The exhibition is subtitled ‘Learning from Athens’, and is marked as much by its dual location…
documenta 14: Art, Athens, Austerity…
[Originally published in Runway: Conversations on May 15, 2017] _ In April of this year I found myself at the Athens opening of documenta 14, in terms of prestige and critical anticipation arguably the apex event of the global contemporary art world. I was with my friend Laura, an artist and cultural…
Market for Immaterial Value: Unmaking Debt and Other Fictions
[First published in 2016 in Runway Issue 30: ‘Ecologies’] Everything is jelly now Air, clouds, us The jelly is the material out of which the immaterial world is made and we are moving towards exhaustion[1. Notes by Nefeli Myrodia, edited by Valentina Karga, ‘The gigantic jellyblob: A participatory lecture-performance at Athens…
Collective objects of anxiety: Things encountered and enacted in Paris, Autumn 2015
[Originally published 2016 in un Magazine 10.1: ‘Co-Workers’] 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…
Michael Stevenson, MCA
Michael Stevenson Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia 6 April – 19 June, 2011 [Highly Commended for the 2011 Frieze Writer’s Prize] There is something serendipitous in Michael Stevenson’s twenty-year retrospective being the final exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art before it closes for long-awaited and controversial renovations. As the…
Travelling to Utopia and back
Utopia Cao Fei Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 2 May – 27 June, 2009 [Highly Commended for the 2009 Frieze Writers’ Prize – judges were James Elkins, Ali Smith & Jennifer Higgie] o Cao Fei’s Utopia is both a place and a non-place. It is a daydream, a fiction and…
Field Work as Sustainment: The Futur(ing) of Art Practice
2. Field Work Lisa Kelly & Dennis Tan 4 – 18 October 2008 Chrissie Cotter Gallery, Sydney [First published in July 2009 in runway, Issue 14: Futures. Reproduced courtesy of The Invisible Inc.] Seen at a glance, this rice straw may appear light and insignificant. Hardly anyone would think that it…