Across two recent exhibitions, Stolon Press: Flat earth (Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne) and Live feed (1301SW, Sydney), the experimental publishing collective Stolon Press (Simryn Gill and Tom Melick) and their interdisciplinary collaborators work with what is close at hand. Discarded cardboard boxes, coffee grounds, one’s own voice, paper, vegetables, typewritten notes, and unframed photographs and prints form the material vocabulary of these two shows. There is a responsiveness too, in their way of working. This became clear in Flat earth—an exhibition put together by Stolon Press, to which they invited long-time collaborators Khaled Sabsabi and Elisa Taber—when the exhibition’s beleaguered completion significantly altered its planned form.

Even before Flat earth was scheduled to open on 8 May 2025, it had been the subject of articles published across national and international news media. Rather than a substantial reading of the exhibition’s content—which was yet to be seen—these articles focussed on Monash University executive management’s decision, announced on 25 March 2025, to ‘indefinitely postpone’ the exhibition. Despite requests for transparency on this decision by university staff, students and others, Monash provided no further information beyond its initial obfuscatory statement—which read in its entirety: ‘Through consultation with our communities we have identified there is a need for the museum to deepen its collaboration and engagement on this exhibition. Postponing the event will allow this important work to be undertaken’—besides reiterating the need for further ‘consultation’ with staff and students.¹

While the university did not acknowledge Sabsabi’s inclusion as the reason for the postponement, the connection was immediately drawn between this and then-recent decision by Creative Australia to rescind their choice of Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino as Australia’s representatives at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Much has been written and discussed regarding Creative Australia’s frankly racist decision, in which they capitulated to long standing anti-Arab and Islamophobic fear-mongering by Liberal politicians and media figures—commentary that has only intensified alongside the Israeli state’s ongoing genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.

Although Flat earth opened on 29 May, and the Sabsabi and Dagostino team were reinstated shortly afterwards, the question remains as to how artists respond to such disruptions.² In the case of Flat earth, the ‘indefinite postponement’ resulted in Stolon Press revisiting their own work and that of the two other artists, to remake the exhibition into one that spoke to the events. Stolon Press’ planned contribution was described as ‘a long-form essay displayed in the gallery as a series of panels … {incorporating} text, drawing, photographs, references and annotations.’ Sabsabi was to exhibit ‘large, coffee-infused calligraphic paintings rooted in tasawwu (Sufism)’, and Taber, a translator and writer, was to show microfilms and text-based work drawn from her ethnographic research and translation practice.³

Flat earth, subsequently, deviated from these original plans and was characterised by a spareness throughout MUMA’s gallery spaces. This is not to deny the richness of the works present, but rather emphasise an intentional shift in legibility from an exhibition broadly centred around text to one that folded opacity into the works, in the Glissantian sense, via formal abstraction and literal silence.⁴ I have written elsewhere on this use of abstraction and minimalism as a tactic to evade culturally-essentialising readings of artworks by non-white artists in Australia—arguing that, following Ghassan Hage’s critique of multiculturalism, this essentialising mode supports the (risk) management of difference by reducing it to something both fully knowable and easily consumable.⁵ I read Flat earth’s revised form, in part, as a response by the exhibitors to the racist scrutiny of their exhibition-in-development.

In Sabsabi’s case, rather than the calligraphic works proposed, he exhibited an iteration of Aajyna (1998/2021/2025)—a large-scale installation where coffee was dripped from a height onto the gallery walls, drying in long streaks and pools on the floor. The exhibition didactic revealed the cultural significance of Sabsabi’s use of coffee in relation to his Lebanese heritage and his treatment of the walls as recalling the foundations of a building in which he and his family sought refuge during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). However, while the work itself materially retained this connection to Sabsabi’s heritage, it simultaneously denied the viewer a singular reading through its abstraction.

Taber’s work, Otra isla rodeada de tierra (Another Island Surrounded by Land) (2026), took the form of five small speakers hanging from the ceiling by their wires, distributed throughout the gallery. These remained silent throughout the majority of the exhibition period, punctuated by a single reading by Taber of an ongoing translation of her first book, written originally in English, into her mother tongue, Spanish. Broadcast late at night near the exhibition’s end (Taber’s early morning in Montreal), the event took place on the same calendar day in both locations. For almost all visitors to Flat earth, the work seemed to frustrate any attempt at knowability, instead arguably entering into the category of artistic refusal.

Similarly, instead of Stolon Press’ proposed discursive works, they contributed the ‘residual’ elements of the piece they had planned to show, Mixed business (2025)—direct prints taken from cardboard produce boxes collected in the vicinity of their Sydney studio. Placed across the floor in three of the gallery’s four spaces were ‘carpets’ of stitched-together cardboard from the flattened boxes, with each bearing the left-over ink from its use as a printmaking plate. While Mixed business did contain text, partially obscured labelling on the boxes detailing country of origin and contents, Stolon Press again move away from directly authored writing and towards minimalist abstraction. The gesture generated an ambiguity of meaning—which like Sabsabi’s Aajyna, prompts questions around demands for legibility from both viewers and institutions.

If Flat earth was characterised by minimalism and residuality, Live feed, a subsequent exhibition put together by Stolon Press, enacted an abundance of expression by the collective and their collaborator, chef Chui Lee Luk—not least through the communal dinners organised by Luk to bracket the exhibition period. Here, Stolon Press continued their long-term project of disciplinary disobedience, producing works that sat at the interstices of publishing, art and facilitating. Hosting Luk’s experiments with cooking and the fraught nature of food service they collectively asked questions of globalised flows of foodstuffs alongside the relationality of eating together.

This collaboration was most obviously manifested in a series of A4 sheets of paper, pinned up in a sprawling grid. Also titled Live feed (2025), each sheet had the name of an ingredient used by Luk. Her parameters for the exhibition had been to obtain all the necessary ingredients to produce both dinners, each attended by about twenty guests and held five weeks apart. In the first dinner the ingredients were used fresh, and during the intervening weeks what was left was displayed on tables while Luk subjected them to pickling, dehydrating and sprouting—or for the potatoes, putting them in a dark cardboard box. This could be described as another kind of residue: what was surplus from the first meal made viable for the next. By the time I visited the exhibition, almost every page had been filled with dated, handwritten notes recording these processes.

Resembling an unbound book, these pages formally echoed the monoprints filling the adjacent space in 1301SW titled Strainers (2025). These works were printed on multiple overlapping lengths of Japanese paper hung high on the walls, and whose plates formed the ‘carpets’ of Mixed business. Here, the corrugated cardboard texture is emphasised, creating a pattern of horizontal lines across the paper. Either Melick or Gill mentioned to me that each print could be considered an essay of sorts, though the comment didn’t quite land until I saw the photo-documentation of their essay in the exhibition, Small talk (2025–), also pinned to the gallery wall.

Using a wide-carriage typewriter, Small talk’s text was printed across three large sheets of paper, creating lines which seem impossibly long and from afar take on the appearance of the cardboard box prints. Returning to Luk’s dinners, the work is conceptualised by Stolon Press as a ‘poultice’ through which discussions over meals are drawn out. As in conversation, the collaboratively-authored text flits from one topic to another, referencing books, anecdotes and other conversations partially remembered. While I remain interested in the way artists produce illegibility and enact withdrawals through their work, Stolon Press remind me that these strategies and their effects are necessitated by context. That is, there are contexts in which artists have to resist in order to speak, and others where there can be space for open exchange and vulnerability.