With another year concluded at Bowen Street Press, we launch our new edition of the BSP Review.

As with previous years, we have focused our content around responses to art. Our authors have been encouraged to write alongside art, providing written content that sits in dialogue with visual mediums. Through poetry and prose, our authors have reflected on art, on memory and the internal experiences invoked by the pieces they opted to respond to.

Our title, ‘sunder’, is inspired by Rumi.

We came whirling 

Out of nothingness 

Scattering stars 

Like dust 

It sunders 

All attachments
[does the poem continue?]

taken from [poem title?], as translated by [whom?]

The Australian Centre for Contempory Art’s exhibit ‘Five Acts of Love’ was a primary source of inspiration for our writers. Curated by Dr Nur Shkembi OAM, ‘Five Acts of Love’ explores themes within Sufi philosophy and presents them through five core experiences.

From the ACCA website:

Five Acts of Love offers space for reflection and an opportunity to delve into profound internal and external truth telling through the exploration of various acts of love. The exhibition revolves around five acts: resistance, revolution, intimacy, memory and annihilation. Each act of love circles around what we ultimately relinquish when we love – and are loved.

Through the works of twelve local and international artists, Five Acts of Love prompted our authors to consider the relationships they have with the entities and phenomena around them. They wrote on themes of self-identity, interdependence, [I can’t really write this sentence without more familiarity with the different pieces]

The authors included here taken efforts to experiment. They have taken their writing to unfamiliar destinations, working within vulnerable spaces and testing new ways of self-expression. They have created meditations on love, on memory, on [again, I need to be more familiar with the pieces]

[everything below is Sarah’s writing from last year]

vulnerability and testing the nature of forms and expressions.

All of the writers that you’ll find here have been willing to take their ideas and their practice into unfamiliar territory with the knowledge that, in the end, a work is more than the sum of its parts—that the process cannot be separated from the outcome and that all of it is an invitation to someplace transcendent.

interdependence with which they are experiences they exist

twelve new

Contempo

We began this publication with a provocation. What would it mean not to write about art, but to write with and through and alongside works of visual art? We spent a lot of time thinking and talking and writing about the relationship between form and content, the way a structure is not a mere container for the knowledge or poetics within, but can also become a part of the storytelling and the texture of the piece. We spent a lot of time thinking and talking about affect, about the experience of reading or viewing or listening to a work of art. We spent a lot of time imagining the ways that creative forms can collaborate across disciplinary lines.

As a result, the pieces that comprise this publication can be described as art writing, but they are also so much more expansive than that. These pieces ran the gamut from essays to poems, dialogical exchanges to personal memoirs, experiments in fragmentation to magic realism to poem. Writing alongside nineteenth century oil paintings or deeply conceptual contemporary works, the substance of these pieces is as varied as their forms, exploring matters of motherhood and domesticity, first loves, family legacies, the fragmented self, the political divide, feminism and questions of art itself.

And so in the end, the pieces contained herein, cannot be reduced to any single genre or container. To quote Justin Clemens, they are: ‘Art as writing, art with writing, writing about art, the art of writing, art against writing, art as the epitome or antithesis of writing, even when it’s nothing but writing.’

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus a lacus id dui vulputate gravida. Phasellus ac nibh nisl. Praesent mattis, tortor et eleifend sodales, risus leo pretium orci, nec semper erat diam a dolor. Curabitur neque felis, ultrices sit amet ex non, convallis tincidunt enim. Curabitur erat eros, venenatis eget purus luctus, condimentum congue dui. In leo sem, lacinia eu euismod ac, consequat at neque. Morbi eu elementum lacus, in gravida ligula.

Fusce et leo eget urna egestas feugiat in vel ligula. Proin vel metus tristique, consectetur orci nec, blandit lectus. Praesent nisl eros, ornare id dolor blandit, aliquet finibus mi. Phasellus sit amet lobortis felis. Vivamus auctor varius massa, in euismod felis condimentum sit amet. In vel risus vitae metus congue semper vel in metus. Vivamus eget augue vel augue molestie sollicitudin. Nulla pretium massa felis, vitae tristique magna eleifend vitae. Sed sit amet velit sapien. Nullam dignissim venenatis erat, id molestie nibh aliquet ultricies. In elementum mauris eu augue iaculis, a porttitor nisl luctus. Etiam finibus porta semper. Nulla maximus eleifend dolor, id feugiat libero dictum fringilla. Fusce rhoncus ex id felis porta, et fringilla turpis faucibus.

Maecenas imperdiet, erat varius tincidunt commodo, est massa suscipit mauris, non vulputate purus tellus ac neque. Nullam nunc metus, volutpat at tellus at, sodales consequat orci. Maecenas congue sit amet nulla eget gravida. Etiam erat nulla, tempus a consectetur varius, aliquam in est. Mauris pellentesque leo convallis, tempor enim a, maximus magna. Nam ut ultricies dui. Donec ac nisi vulputate, feugiat justo id, pretium ipsum. Morbi at finibus ex, nec tristique tellus. Donec turpis sapien, iaculis sit amet nunc ac, commodo accumsan ipsum. Mauris vel eros facilisis, porttitor risus blandit, facilisis massa. Pellentesque convallis ex in odio tristique ultrices. Nunc convallis tincidunt velit et dignissim. Etiam non laoreet mi. Mauris.