Platforms

Join us for the public program for Objects testify, an exhibition exploring the colonial legacies of Australia's built environment and its ongoing impact on First Nations communities, led by Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist Joel Sherwood Spring. A program of closed and public conversations between First Nations  community, scholars, artists, architects, and designers articulates the wider discourses of Objects testify and consider the possibility of new forms of testimony. 

Join Joel Sherwood Spring and guests Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks as they address the question: Who is best served when cultural institutions pursue the rapid adoption of digital technology under the guise of openness?

About the participants

Astrid Lorange is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at UNSW Sydney. Her research focuses on cultural studies of contemporary poetry, art, and media. Lorange is the author of How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein (Wesleyan University Press) and Homework, a book of essays co-authored with Andrew Brooks (Discipline). Her most recent poetry collection is Labour and Other Poems (Cordite Books). She is a member of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate, an editor at Rosa Press, and a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network.

Andrew Brooks is a writer, artist, and teacher who lives on unceded Wangal land. He is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at UNSW whose work investigates media and mediation, infrastructural inequalities and circulatory struggles, policing and abolition, race and racialisation, and aesthetics. He is a co-director of the UNSW Media Futures Hub, a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network, a co-editor of the publishing collective Rosa Press, and an affiliate investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. With Astrid Lorange, he is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate and their book, Homework, was published by Discipline in 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection, Inferno, published by Rosa Press in 2021. 

Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist, writer and broadcaster, who works collaboratively on projects that sit outside  established discourses of contemporary art, architecture and power. His discursive and spatial practice examines the contested narratives of  Australia’s urban cultural and Indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation. Spring is a Co-Director of Future Method Studio, a collaborative and interdisciplinary practice working across  architecture, installation and speculative projects. In 2021, he guest edited Runway Journal’s 44th issue TIME and was a commissioned artist for Ceremony, the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial, 2022 at the National Gallery of Australia, curated by Hetti Perkins.