Produced on the occasion of Lisa Adkins’ talk discussing how we might rethink the maintenance and reproduction of the household today. She preposes that we think of this as a relationship between the household and its necessary, contracted payments to finance capital (for utilities and services, as loan repayments, rent, etc.)

The talk was co-presented with Benison Kilby, as a part of her exhibition “Bodies of Work”. The exhibition looked at how a group of artists respond to the intersections of reproductive, care, and feminised labour that maintain, and increasingly define, our current living conditions.

Designed by Ziga Testen.

More information on the talk can be found here and a recording of the talk can be found here.

Pamphlet for the exhibition of one work by Charlotte Posenenske, exhibited in-situ in a training room at the offices of the United Workers Union. The work was from her “DW Series” (1967), a minimal set of square cardboard tubes which are collaboratively put together by participants in the context where they are exhibited.

Wednesday 18 December 2019 6–8pm
United Workers Union
Lvl 1, 833 Bourke St, Docklands, VIC 3008

Organised by Nicholas Tammens with Imogen Beynon and Eloise Sweetman. The first configuration was made by Cameron Stops, Bridget Erin Flack, Megan Berry, Jenna Christie, Kate O’Brien, Zarah and Rhodes—all union organisers at the United Workers Union.

Designed by Ziga Testen.

You can find more on the exhibition here

As part of Paris Internationale 2019, 1856 presented “Everything is fine” with work by Patricia L. Boyd, Ian Burn, Lauren Burrow, and Fred Lonidier.

The work of art is possibly one of the only commodities with equal claim to both private and civic space. It is due to how artworks are embedded in our social relations that we recognise their different values: as historical artefacts, as objects of appreciation (“beautiful” or sensible to taste), political critiques, private financial investments, modes of communication, public documents of the national imaginary—the list goes on. However, the line that divides private and civic has become ever more indiscernible in recent decades—for instance, the erosion of public infrastructure and state industry, private capitalisation on culture and entertainment, the withering of the 8 hour work day, the return of 19th century work conditions, and the ongoing enclosure of our personal lives by a new technological industrialism. In response we might ask, in a reflective manner, what capacity the work of art has to represent these problems at the different points of its reception. The four artists selected here, at different times and with different methods, have asked this of their work.

Curated by Nicholas Tammens. Designed by Ziga Testen.

More on information can be found here.

Gordon Hookey’s cycle of monumental paintings MURRILAND! (2015–ongoing) re-envisions the history of his home state of Queensland, Australia, surveying pre-colonisation to the present day, unravelling received versions of history and confronting non-Indigenous narratives. This publication GORDON HOOKEY: Summoning Time, Painting & Politikill Transition in MURRILAND! compiles materials surrounding the first canvas in the series, coinciding with its presentation in documenta 14. It features Hookey’s source material; an essay by Aboriginal historian Michael Aird; a conversation between Gordon Hookey, Frontier Imaginaries curator Vivian Ziherl, and documenta 14 curator Hendrik Folkerts; and a dialogue between Gordon Hookey and anthropologist Johannes Fabian. This book is published as a collaboration between Griffith University, Frontier Imaginaries, documenta 14, and the Van Abbemuseum. Designed by Ziga Testen.

Produced on the occasion of Nicholas Mangan – Termite Economies, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 4 August–1 September, 2018. Unbound section of proposed forthcoming publication. Text by S.T Lore and designed by Ziga Testen.

The starting point of Mangan’s exhibition, Termite Economies (Phase 1) is an anecdote that the CSIRO researched termite behaviour in the hope that the insects might one day lead humans to gold deposits; a proposal to exploit the natural activity of termite colonies for economic gain. In this exhibition, Mangan combines footage he filmed on location in Western Australia, alongside archival video and table-mounted sculptures, to speculate on the use of termites as miners and to construct a narrative that parallels human, social, ecological, and economic activity. At the core of this investigation, Mangan ruminates on how capitalism puts nature to work. Using a 3D printer, plaster and soil, Mangan has created models that hybridise mining infrastructure with termite architecture to form speculative termite mining infrastructures.

“Our Group Wourk” is an attempt to NOT write a biography of Yugoslavian graphic designer Dragan Stojanovski. Stojanovski was the in-house graphic designer at SKC Belgrade (student cultural centre), a state-funded cultural institution established after the 1968 student uprisings to contain, pacify and institutionalize student culture as an “organized alternative”. At the same time, it was a place of avant-garde experimentation and new forms of political activism and self-organization. Dunja Blazevic, a director of the visual arts department at the SKC in the 1970s refers to Stojanovski as Yugoslavia’s first conceptual designer.

This publication was prompted by conversations and encounters with Sasa Stojanovski, Biljana Tomic, Sklavko Timotijevic, Ljubinka Gavran, Milica Tomic, Slobodan Jovanovic and Dunja Blazevic with Ziga Testen, Peter Rauch and Cornelia Durka in Belgrade in April 2013.