Published on the occasion of Dean Sameshima’s recent solo exhibition at Soft Opening, being alone is edited by Antonia Marsh, designed by Robert Milne, and features a newly commissioned essay from American writer, critic and poet Bruce Hainley.

In each of the twenty-five black and white photographs that comprise Dean Sameshima’s recent series being alone, the outline of a solitary viewer sits bathed in light emitting from the glowing screen of a Berlin porn theatre. These cinemas offer the kind of encounter that has been described as an “anonymous being-together”, a space wherein an individual can project not only his own desire and sexual fantasy onto the screen but disidentify with the confining projections of the external world.

Designed to protect its occupants from judgement and persecution, the artist enshrines these private rooms, continuing his documentation of the architecture and physical characteristics of queer spaces. While Sameshima atypically retains the presence of bodies in these images, with no identifying features revealed, his focus locates more deliberately on the anonymity of these individuals alongside the emptiness that surrounds them.

GHOST TOWN by Ola Vasiljeva is the first comprehensive overview of Vasiljeva’s practice and (re)collects the fragments, shapes, and thoughts that have been (re)configured and (re)presented throughout Ola’s multi­faceted constellations from 2008 to 2023.

Edited by Roos Gortzak and designed by Robert Milne, the publication consists of several intertwined sections, including Ola’s exhibitions; texts by Roos Gortzak, Chris Fitzpatrick, Anna Gritz, Daniil Kharms, and Kate Strain; an ALBUM by The Oceans Academy of Arts (OAOA); and STORAGE that functions as ‘both a compass for navigating the archipelago of her piled arrangements, and later, as a mnemonic device.’

“A sense of art history is part of the critical basis on which artists construct ‘a future’ of art. But the question is, which sense of art history will be shaping that future? Art history has always been far too important to be simply left up to art historians.”
— Ian Burn, 1985

This presentation is organised by Robert Milne and includes a work by Ian Burn from 1989, exhibited with selected publications and other documentation, to coincide with the release of the new book. The Estate of Ian Burn is represented by Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane.

Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—and, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an ex-Conceptual artist’. This volume brings together a diverse collection of Burn’s writings that reveals a probing, analytical artist who turned to language to articulate the need for ‘looking at seeing and reading’, who pursued a Marxist politics in the face of neoliberalism and who sought to occupy and transform the margins of landscape painting. The publication includes previously unpublished material and offers a prescient rethinking of art in a decentered world through what Burn called ‘peripheral vision’.

Ian Burn: COLLECTED WRITINGS 1966–1993 is edited by Ann Stephen and designed by Robert Milne, with contributions by Art & Language, Adrian Piper, Paul Wood, Allan Sekula, and Mel Ramsden.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Me in my going out of myself (and you in yours) by Reinier Vrancken & Émile Hermans at SB34 The Pool, Brussels. Designed by Robert Milne.

“…exchanges and relationships—from me to you and vice versa—with circulating objects and identities, fiction and artificiality, and unstable ontological statuses. From Émile Hermans to Reinier Vrancken, or the other way around, it’s a matter of becoming the other a little, of letting oneself be taken in hand so as to project unexpressed desires. In the space of SB34-The Pool, clothes are lent, flowers offered, we breathe the scent of a stranger, choose the work of a friend, project ourselves through it, and finally, with circumspection, decide on the status of what we have observed.”—exhibition press release

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Symptom by Andrew Long, held at the Epworth Building, Suite 552, 33 Pirie Street, Adelaide/Tarndanya, 12 –27 February, 2021. Text by Patrice Sharkey. Designed by Robert Milne.