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un Projects

un Anthology

un Anthology 2004-2014: a decade of art and ideas – a new book celebrating ten years of un Magazine.

A compendium of articles, essays, reviews and artist pages selected from a decade of publishing, un Anthology offers a unique take on Australia’s independent contemporary art scene. Featuring hundreds of artists and writers from un Magazine’s archive plus new commissions from Lily Hibberd and Kelly Fliedner, Anthony Gardner, Justin Clemens, Bianca Hester, and Lisa Radford, the book is co-edited by Ulanda Blair, Rosemary Forde and Phip Murray.

Available for order via un Projects. For enquiries please email [email protected]

Highly commended in the Art Association of Australian & New Zealand (AAANZ) 2017 arts writing prize in the anthology category, the judges had this to say:

As a collection it is a remarkable testament to the skill and talent of the emerging and established writers and artists who contributed to it, as well as to the recent history of independent art practice in Australia over a decade. One of the fascinating aspects of collating this material into an anthology is that pieces written as immediate and direct responses to art installations and exhibitions develop a new and different value as something permanent rather than provisional. After the closure of Gertrude Contemporary in its original location, the importance of the volume as historical record is now greater than ever.

Insightful, original, irreverent, and politically engaged, the quality of the essays in this anthology is high. They are presented in strict chronological order and the predominance of reviews gradually gives way to other, more ambitious and experimental forms of writing about art. The commemorative quality of the enterprise is enhanced by the five new essays at the end of the volume commissioned by the editors to accompany, look back on and evaluate the original articles and the nature of the art world in that decade in Melbourne…

In sum this is a highly impressive anthology. On the one hand it represents a rare and important record of a particular time in the Melbourne art scene, and in that sense is highly specific to that city’s inner suburban networks. On the other its structure might serve as a model for crafting a new type of artistic history of urban cities around Australia.

Photo credit: Madeleine Chiller

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