BLOWERS: Blowmania LP

Paul Yore is one of Australia’s most thought-provoking and consequential multidisciplinary artists. Born in Naarm/Melbourne in 1987, he lives and works on Gunaikurnai Country in Gippsland, Victoria, and completed his studies in painting, archaeology and anthropology at Monash University in 2010. Yore’s work engages with the histories of religious art and ritual, queer identity, pop culture and neo-liberal capitalism, recasting a vast array of found images, materials and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux and assemblages which celebrate hybrid and fluid identities, unstable and contradictory meanings, and the glowing horizon of queer worldmaking. Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH is an expansive and exciting monograph on the work of one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. The book brings together work and themes emergent from throughout Paul Yore’s career as well as new work, imagery and insights from his 2022 survey exhibition at ACCA, also titled WORD MADE FLESH. The 416-page publication is an object that is comprehensive in its written content and deeply considered in its design. The design and materiality of the book directly responds to iconography, principles, materiality, histories and ideas that the artist explores in his practice. For example, the die-cut hole on the cover gestures a subversive perforation – the breaking and pushing of a medium – while internal pages thread together thought-provoking forms and ideas by layering drawings, images, colour, typography and scale to invite an active reading experience. Rich and detailed imagery of Yore’s multidisciplinary practice is accompanied by specially commissioned texts by leading Australian and international artists, scholars and commentators such as Tony Albert, hanna baer, Mikala Dwyer, Daniel Fountain, Helen Hughes and Bruce LaBruce. An extended interview with Paul Yore by Max Delany delves into the artist’s biography and provides further context to the references that are threaded through his practice to date. This book is limited to 1000 copies

Growing up in a strict Muslim community in south-east London, Alom Shaha learnt that religion was not to be questioned. Reciting the Qur’an without understanding what it meant was simply a part of life; so, too, was obeying the imam and enduring beatings when he failed to attend the local mosque. Shaha was more drawn to science and its power to illuminate. As a teen, he lived between two worlds: the home controlled by his authoritarian father, and a school alive with books and ideas. In a charming blend of memoir, philosophy, and science, Shaha explores the questions about faith and the afterlife that we all ponder. Through a series of loose ‘lessons’, he tells his own compelling story, drawing on the theories of some of history’s greatest thinkers and interrogating the fallacies that have impeded humanity for centuries. Shaha recounts how his education and formative experiences led him to question how to live without being tied to what his parents, priests, or teachers told him to believe, and offers insights so that others may do the same. This is a book for anyone who thinks about what they should believe and how they should live. It’s for those who may need the facts and the ideas, as well as the courage, to break free from inherited beliefs. In this powerful narrative, Shaha shows that it is possible to live a compassionate, fulfilling, and meaningful life without God.