Hear from Daniel Browning, Professor of Indigenous Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Sydney, for a lecture on the state of contemporary art and criticism in Australia, with introduction by Tristen Harwood.

Presented in partnership with Memo Review and University Art Museums Association.

Professor of Indigenous Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Sydney, Daniel Browning is Bundjalung and Kullilli writer, journalist and radio broadcaster. In a 30-year media career with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Daniel read news for youth network triple j, produced award-winning radio documentaries and features for ABC Radio National, presented the Indigenous art and culture program Awaye! for 15 years and established Word Up, a shortform podcast on the revival of Indigenous languages. His podcasts Fernando's ghost and Cast among strangers were the most highly awarded, receiving a bronze at the New York Festival of the World's Best Radio and honourable mentions internationally. The former Editor Indigenous Radio at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation also hosted The Art Show from 2021 until 2025. His first book, Close to the Subject: Selected Works, which catalogues his freelance critical writing on the arts, as well as poetry, memoir and his first play, won the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. In the same year Daniel was also the recipient of the Indigenous Writing Prize, a category of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. A finalist in the June Andrews Prize for Arts Journalism in 2024, he won the inaugural Arts Journalism and Arts Criticism Prize in 2025 with ABC colleagues Rudi Bremer and Teresa Tan, both awards presented by the Walkley Foundation. His recent publications include articles for Gradhiva, ArtReview and Art Basel.

 

Tristen Harwood is a Boorloo-born, Naarm-based writer of Aboriginal and European descent. He is a lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, a PhD candidate at RMIT, and a senior editor at Memo. His writing on art has been published broadly in local and international publications.

Memo is an Australian art writing platform that publishes regular reviews of contemporary Australian art exhibitions and longer forms of writing, both online and in print. Memo was founded in Melbourne in 2017 and in 2022 expanded to Sydney. It is run by an editorial collective of arts writers and historians. Memo Review Inc. is an independent not-for-profit organisation without institutional affiliation.

University Art Museums Australia (UAMA) is a peak body representing 26 art museums and galleries in the university sector. It drives advocacy and research on behalf of its constituents, while contributing to Australia's cultural ecology by supporting visual arts and museum research, and community engagement initiatives.

 

 

 

Hear from Susie Anderson (Blue), Sam Beard (Dispatch), Paris Lettau (Memo) and Robert Leonard (Town Hall) as they reflect on the vital role of criticism in developing artistic practices that are presented in biennials. Panelists will speak to how art journals foster discourse that shapes exhibition practice and reflect on how reviews influence exhibition histories.

Susie Anderson is Wergaia/Wemba Wemba writer of prose and poetry from regional Victoria. As Managing Editor of Blue Art Journal, she is excited to support the next generation of First Nations arts writing.

Sam Beard is the head editor and co-founder of Dispatch Review. His writing has appeared in Artlink, un Magazine, Art Collector and Memo Magazine.

Paris Lettau is Editor-in-Chief of Memo Magazine and an editor and writer for Memo Review and other publications.

Robert Leonard, editor, Town Hall, and Director, Institute of Modern Art, co-commissioner of Joel Sherwood Spring's presentation in 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength.

Image: 2021 Adelaide//International, Opening Event, 2021. Samstag Museum of Art. Photograph by Sia Duff.

Established in Australia’s experimental performance scene (1999-2006) with his autofiction monologues and 20-minute improvisations, Brian Fuata works across visual and live arts via performance, film, installation, email and sms text, social media and print. His practice in structured improvisation is the ‘mediation of performance’ drawn from reading select physical, social and relational features of a given site and context to manifest his live and digital events.

Fuata's credits include: Apparitional resurrect, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2024); Untitled (Intermission), ANTI Festival Finland (2022); of a house besieged (proposition tweaked), Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021); Apparitional Charlatan ~ Minor Appearances, NIRIN GIR: Biennale of Sydney (2020).