A little more on publications.

Bidoun magazine (born 2004) is a refreshing springboard for critical and contemporary ideas about arts and culture from the Middle East. As editor Antonia Carver observes in this Guardian article, artists from the Middle East are perpetually struggling against being read exclusively in terms of their geographic location, religion, and heritage. An internationally distributed publication, with an impressive editing staff based in Cairo, Dubai and New York, Bidoun is one platform that addresses this narrow frame and transcends it. Beautiful work and slick, intelligent writing. I have yet to find a local vendor for Bidoun, but in the meantime there's always subscription...

Meanjin - literary magazine in the truest sense - is a quarterly put out by Melbourne University Publishing. I say truly literary because its content covers interviews, critiques, reviews, fiction, poetry, contemporary concerns and issues - all sorts, and always impeccably put together by current editor, Sophie Cunningham. I am especially fond of their issues themed 'On Translation' (#4, 2005), and 'On Drugs' (#2, 2002). Meanjin is locally housed by the General Library at University and Central City Library has a few copies too.

For those of you that didn't catch the inaugural issue of Matters, the publication Newcall Gallery launched last year, you haven't quite missed it all out - the publication's got CNZ funding, so we should be seeing more issues quite soon.

Soanyway ...

Lisa Stansbie (also currently showing at Window online) is the co-editor, with Derek Horton, of the newly launched online magazine Soanyway.

Soanyway is a extended collaborative meditation on stories and the nature of story-telling: "We interpret the idea of a ‘story’ very openly, in relation to fact and fiction, narration or implication, and structure or a lack of it. And we regard most history, theory and critique as stories about stories."

A bit of a sucker for the strange eccentricities of history, I particularly enjoyed Keith W Roberts' 'Funeral Meme' in the Now and Then issue. Joe Mawson's 'Heck' in the same issue seems like a beautifully thoughtful work, and I also really liked Horton's 'Citizenship' in the Somewhere and Nowhere issue. Plenty to look at, and it seems that Stansbie and Horton are setting a cracking pace for publication with seven issues produced since the publication's launch in January this year.

“There's a thousand sides to everything - not just heroes and villains. So anyway, ... so anyway, ... so anyway… “So anyway” ought to be one word. Like a place or a river… Soanyway River.”

(Zabriskie Point, 1970, Michelangelo Antonioni)