After visiting Inter-narratives of hope: building catastrophe resilience at MADA and before reading the accompanying exhibition I called a friend and had a whinge about this show. I complained that I didn’t see a strong connection between the works on display. I grumbled that the curatorial vision isn’t strong enough if it’s unclear from viewing the show alone, and you should’ve have to read an essay to derive meaning from an exhibition. I whinged that the title of the show was an over intellectualisation from PhD candidates (which I still partly stand behind) and inaccessible for the public as a curatorial concept. I’d like to make a correction to what I said to my friend; this is a great show, and made stronger by its accompanying text. I feel blind for not reading it while in the space and for only being able to view the work with this lens in hindsight.

Forever Bedroom, Nina Seeburg’s ode to our quietest, most personal spaces is an intimate portrayal of the refuge found in our childhood bedrooms, the first rooms of our own. Greeting you up the stairs that lead to Changing Room Gallery is a vanity, littered with personal effects (clown, axe, and giant dildo included) a taster for the intimacy and clarity of theming that defines Forever Bedroom. 

Though Bec has covered it before, and I live less than a kilometre away, I had never been to George Paton Gallery before this week. The UMSU Gallery was a trove of artistic potential, but perhaps none more so than As Long As You Love Me, the video installation work by Alanna Baxter, Lara Oluklu and Naimo Omar. I couldn’t tell you how long the loop is, as I was so engrossed, walking back and forth between the three screens so as to not miss anything, that I didn’t think to note the timing. Simple on a surface level – three screens, a dark curtain, white text on black cutting between film snippets – Baxter, Oluklu, and Omar have made something totally their own out of an entirely borrowed script. 

Before this Wednesday, I’d never been to HAIR before – strange, given its proximity to my beloved Queen Vic Market. Across the street from the iconic facade, HAIR neighbours Sticky Institute, and this exhibition spoke directly to its location, and The Last Chance (Rock & Roll Bar), just a few hundred metres away. Millennial Kennels by Jordan Halsall and Steven J Hutton features four kennels made of plywood, printed with images of jeans. The jeans are definitively punk, variously featuring rips, paint, buttons, patches, mending, and distress.