Dr Astrid Lorange

Dr Astrid Lorange

Senior Lecturer
Arts,Design & Architecture
School of Art & Design

Astrid Lorange is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art & Design. She is also a writer, researcher, editor, and artist. She studied writing and cultural studies at the University of Technology Sydney, where she completed her doctoral thesis on Gertrude Stein and contemporary poetics. How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein, a scholarly monograph based on the thesis, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2014.

Astrid is a cultural studies scholar who mostly writes about contemporary poetry, art, and media. She studies how critical reading practices and publics come to navigate power and transform social relations. Specifically, she examine the way that cultural texts – art, literature, media, policy – emerge in relation to disciplinary structures (race; gender and sexuality; settler-colonialism and the nation-state; law; labour; bureaucracy) as forms of critique and documents of resistance. Her cultural studies scholarship draws on methods from literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, media studies, art theory, social theory, and political economy. 

One current research project, Archival Remediations analyses poems that transform archival materials that wouldn’t ordinarily be read ‘as’ literature or art – legal documents, state records, policy, legal proceedings, trade agreements, contracts of sale, and other artefacts of the settler-colonial state – into poems. It studies how the material transformation of the language of statecraft offers both a critique and refusal of state power while also showing how settler histories are produced according to the self-styled poetics of nationhood. The project argues that attention to the writtenness of such history can be a way of working against the naturalisation of settler claims to sovereignty. The documentary poems included in the study do not renarrativise historical events, nor are they recuperative or reparative attempts to ‘correct’ the historical record. Instead, they work directly with the material archive in order to direct critical readerly attention to the construction of that record and therefore to the socio-discursive operations of state power. This kind of reading does something to poetry – it expands ideas about poetry by showing how the transformation from ‘document’ to ‘poem’ forces an understanding of poetry as a way of reading the material and medial properties of a given text. It also does something to history – for if we read history with the readerly attention we give to poems, we not only read history’s poetics, but we also discover the specific textual instances in which history was taken by force.

Another project, in its early stages, proposes to write a literary theory of the headache. The project reads headaches, when they appear in novels, poems, essays, and letters, as literary objects through which to read the material conditions and affective structures that accompany the world-making trauma of industrial capitalism.

Additionally, Astrid is currently writing a book with her collaborator Dr Andrew Brooks (School of Arts & Media). The book, provisionally titled Art of Unmaking, proposes a contemporary study of abolitionist art in Australia. It asks: what does art contribute to the larger project of abolition? The book argues that abolitionist aesthetics can be understood as a framework for reading contemporary art that stages a confrontation with settlement: specifically, we argue that this confrontation takes the form of an ‘unmaking’ inherent in the work of art which is directed against what Aileen Moreton-Robinson famously names ‘the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty’. 

Astrid is a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network and a member of the Media Futures Hub at UNSW. 

Astrid is author of several books of poetry, including, most recently, Labour and Other Poems (Cordite Books, 2020). Raw Materials is forthcoming from Atelos Press.

With Dr Andrew Brooks, she is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate, who make exhibitions, publications, and public programs. Snack Syndicate's book of essays Homework was published by Discipline in 2021.

At UNSW Art & Design, Astrid convenes the undergraduate/postgraduate courses Writing as Practice (DART3341) and Art Writing and Publishing (SAHT9112), and co-convenes Art, Gender and Sexuality (DART3320) with Dr Tim Gregory. She supervises Honours projects from Art Theory and English/Creative Writing, and supervises HDR projects (see supervision tab for more information).

 

 

  • Books | 2021
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2021, Homework, Discipline
    Books | 2014
    Lorange A, 2014, How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein, Wesleyan University Press, http://www.upne.com/0819575111.html
  • Book Chapters | 2024
    Lorange A, 2024, 'The Sound a Sentence Makes: On Poetry, Judgement, and Hearing', in Groth H; Murphet J (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies, Edinburgh Companions to Litera, pp. 19 - 31
    Book Chapters | 2023
    Lorange A; Brooks A, 2023, ''If I write a Love poem it's against the police': The Abolitionist Poetics of the Riot', in Writing the Global Riot Literature in a Time of Crisis, Oxford University Press
    Book Chapters | 2021
    Lorange A, 2021, 'The Work of Poetry', in Disney D; Hall M (ed.), New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 193 - 203, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76287-2_16
    Book Chapters | 2012
    Lorange A, 2012, 'The Objects Have Been Equal to the Occasion', in Butler on Whitehead: On the Occasion, Lexington Books, pp. 165 - 184
  • Journal articles | 2023
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2023, '“Extraordinary powers for extraordinary times”: A conjunctural analysis of pandemic policing, common sense, and the abolitionist horizon', Crime, Media, Culture, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17416590231205901
    Journal articles | 2022
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2022, 'Torrens Title: property, race and (infra)structures of feeling in the settler colony', Race and Class, 64, pp. 63 - 83, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/03063968221098623
    Journal articles | 2022
    Lorange A; Brooks A, 2022, 'Endless Study, Infinite Debt: On study inside and outside the university classroom', Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 10, http://dx.doi.org/10.14426/cristal.v10iSI.516
    Journal articles | 2022
    Lorange A, 2022, 'READING HISTORY AGAINST THE STATE SECRET: carlos soto román’s “chile project: [re-classified],” the remediated archive, and the poetics of redaction', Angelaki - Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 27, pp. 17 - 29, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046356
    Journal articles | 2021
    Brooks A; Lorange A; Grealy L, 2021, 'Everything Must Change', Infrastructural Inequalities Journal, https://infrastructuralinequalities.net/issue-2/everything-must-change/
    Journal articles | 2021
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2021, 'There’s a riot goin’ on', Continuum, 35, pp. 123 - 136, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2021.1879020
    Journal articles | 2020
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2020, '22nd Biennale of Sydney, “Nirin”', Art Agenda, https://www.art-agenda.com/features/328963/22nd-biennale-of-sydney-nirin
    Journal articles | 2019
    Brooks A; Lorange A; Grealy L; Lea T; Cornell C, 2019, 'Tending a Social Infrastructure', Infrastructural Inequalities Journal, https://infrastructuralinequalities.net/issue-1/introduction/
    Journal articles | 2019
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2019, 'Rifles or Ruffles', The Lifted Brow, 44, pp. 79 - 84, https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2019/11/29/ruffles-or-rifles-by-astrid-lorange-and-andrew-brooks
    Journal articles | 2019
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2019, 'no trouble here: : On Sally M. Nangala Mulda’s “Town Camp Anywhere”', Running Dog, https://rundog.art/no-trouble-here-sally-m-nangala-mulda/
    Journal articles | 2019
    Lorange A, 2019, 'Poetry, Law and the News: Re-reading the Australian Constitution', Australian Humanities Review, pp. 47 - 61, http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2019/05/27/poetry-law-and-the-news-re-reading-the-australian-constitution/
    Journal articles | 2018
    Gregory T; Lorange A, 2018, 'Teaching Post-Pornography', Cultural Studies Review, 24, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v24i1.5303
    Journal articles | 2017
    Lorange A; Brooks A, 2017, 'Gossip and its Minor Discourses', Discipline, 4.5, pp. 35 - 50
    Journal articles | 2017
    Lorange A; Brooks A, 2017, 'Review: The National: New Australian Work', Art and Australia, http://www.artandaustralia.com/online/discursions/national-new-australian-art
    Journal articles | 2017
    Lorange A; Russell FJ, 2017, 'On paranoia and conspiracy: Recent art from Western Australia', Artlink: Australian contemporary art quarterly, 37, pp. 58 - 63
    Journal articles | 2017
    Lorange A, 2017, 'Creativity and the Lyric Address', TEXT Journal, http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue40/Lorange.pdf
    Journal articles | 2015
    Lorange A, 2015, 'Review of 24 Frames Per Second', Artlink: Australian contemporary art quarterly, 35, https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4372/24-frames-per-second/
    Journal articles | 2015
    Lorange A, 2015, 'Review: Barrett, Estelle and Bolt, Barbara, Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the arts', Somatechnics, 4, pp. 194 - 196, http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/soma.2014.0123
  • Creative Works (non-textual) | 2022
    Lorange A; Brooks A, 2022, These Thoughts Large and Public, Take Hold of the Clouds, Victorian Trades Hall, 30 July 2022 - 31 July 2022, medium: Installation art, at: https://www.takeholdoftheclouds.com/
    Creative Written Works | 2021
    Brooks A; Lorange A; Lean T; Kilroy D, 2021, Abolition is a Verb, https://infrastructuralinequalities.net/issue-2/abolition-is-a-verb/
    Creative Written Works | 2021
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2021, Cyprien Gaillard, Julia Stoschek Collection
    Recorded / Rendered Creative Works | 2021
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2021, Ghosts, Sydney Review of Books, Sydney, Published: 09 August 2021, Recorded / Rendered Creative Works, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/snack-syndicate-ghosts/
    Creative Works (non-textual) | 2021
    Lorange A; Brooks A, 2021, Supply Chain, Supply Chain, Bus Projects, 22 June 2021 - 17 July 2021, at: https://busprojects.org.au/program/snack-syndicate
    Curatorial Outputs | 2020
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2020, Endless Study, Infinite Debt: Protocols for listening in (and after) social isolation, exhibited at: Online - Liquid Architecture, 26 May 2020 - 14 June 2020, https://snacksyndicate.net/protocols/
    Creative Written Works | 2020
    Lorange A, 2020, Labour and Other Poems, Cordite Books, https://corditebooks.org.au/products/labour-and-other-poems
    Creative Written Works | 2020
    Lorange A, 2020, Sentences, Paragraphs, Essays, Poems, Sydney Review of Books, Sydney Review of Books, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/diana-hamilton-trisha-low/
    Creative Written Works | 2019
    Brooks A; Lorange A; Cross D, 2019, ‘We All Live in Colonised Time’: An Interview with Dean Cross, https://infrastructuralinequalities.net/issue-1/we-all-live-in-colonised-time-an-interview-with-dean-cross/
    Creative Written Works | 2019
    Brooks A; Lorange A; Smith J, 2019, ‘The Comfort Zone’s the Enemy of the Spirit, Jack!’: An Interview with Uncle Jimmy Smith, https://infrastructuralinequalities.net/issue-1/the-comfort-zones-the-enemy-of-the-spirit-jack-an-interview-with-uncle-jimmy-smith/
    Creative Works (non-textual) | 2019
    Lorange A; Brooks A, 2019, Endless Study, Infinite Debt: Occasional Gifts, Shapeshifters: New Forms of Curatorial Research, Monash Art, Design & Architecture Gallery, 13 March 2019 - 14 March 2019, at: https://www.monash.edu/mada/events/shapeshifters
    Creative Written Works | 2018
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2018, Autumn/Winter
    Creative Written Works | 2018
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2018, Warm Ties, Running Dog, https://rundog.art/warm-ties-helen-johnson/
    Creative Works (non-textual) | 2018
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2018, Camel Coat, Camel Coat, Firstdraft, 02 May 2018 - 25 May 2018, at: https://snacksyndicate.net/camel-coat/
    Curatorial Outputs | 2018
    Lorange A; Brooks A; Grealy L; Cornell C; Lea T, 2018, Infrastructural Inequalities Exhibition and Public Program, exhibited at: Artspace, Woolloomooloo, 27 September 2018 - 07 October 2018, https://www.artspace.org.au/program/public-programs/2018/infrastructural-inequalities-public-program/
    Creative Written Works | 2018
    Lorange A, 2018, Forging the Declaration, Sydney Review of Books, Menzies C, (ed.), Sydney Review of Books, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/forging-the-declaration-vincent-namatjira/
    Creative Works (non-textual) | 2017
    Lorange A; Brooks AN, 2017, Cold Cuts, Cold Cuts, Alaska Projects, 04 August 2017 - 26 August 2017, at: https://snacksyndicate.net/cold-cuts/
    Creative Written Works | 2017
    Lorange A; Clemens J, 2017, Doughnut, The Lifted Brow, The Lifted Brow, https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2018/2/4/doughnut-by-justin-clemens-astrid-lorange
    Creative Written Works | 2017
    Lorange A, 2017, Chemical Collapse, Chemical Collapse, Melick T, (ed.), Slug, http://www.slug.directory/1-chemical-collapse-astrid-lorange/
    Creative Works (non-textual) | 2016
    Lorange A; Brooks AN, 2016, Little Pharma, Little Pharma, Artspace, Sydney, 12 May 2016 - 23 May 2016, at: https://www.artspace.org.au/program/ideas-platform/2016/snack-syndicate-little-pharma/
    Conference Presentations | 2016
    Lorange A; Monin M, 2016, 'A Poetics of Computation: critical approaches to reading and writing with data', presented at Electronic Visualisation and the Arts Australasia, University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia, 05 March 2016 - 06 March 2016
    Recorded / Rendered Creative Works | 2016
    Lorange A; Monin M, 2016, The Living Index, The Book of Days, Sydney Writers Festival, Walsh Bay, Australia, Editor(s): Sadokierski Z, Published: 25 May 2016, Recorded / Rendered Creative Works, http://www.swf.org.au/component/option,com_2015/Itemid,416/agid,4716/task,view_detail/
    Curatorial Outputs | 2016
    Lorange A; O'Connor V, 2016, Hell Broth, exhibited at: Firstdraft, Woolloomooloo, 04 February 2016 - 26 February 2016, Hell Broth, http://firstdraft.org.au/exhibitions/hellbroth/
    Creative Written Works | 2016
    Lorange A, 2016, On Transmission Detox, On Transmission Detox, Museum of Contemporary Art, https://www.mca.com.au/artists-and-works/artist-commissions/marian-tubbs-transmission-detox-2015/transmission-detox-astrid-lorange/
    Creative Written Works | 2016
    Lorange A, 2016, Reading Paintings and Poems, Blackbox Manifold, http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue16/AstridLorangeEssayBM16.pdf
    Creative Works (non-textual) | 2015
    Brooks A; Lorange A, 2015, Revenge Body, Capitalist Surrealism, National Gallery of Victoria, 24 September 2015 - 24 September 2015, at: https://snacksyndicate.net/revenge-body/
    Creative Written Works | 2015
    Lorange A; Brooks A, 2015, Techniques Against Optimism, Westpace Journal, Westspace
    Recorded / Rendered Creative Works | 2015
    Lorange A; Monin M, 2015, Affective Citations, Liquid Architecture, Firstdraft, Woolloomooloo, Australia, Published: 02 October 2015, Recorded / Rendered Creative Works
    Conference Posters | 2014
    Gregory TW; Lorange A, (eds.), 2014, 'Non-directive Feedback Loop', UNSW, pp. 35 - 36, presented at Moving Feedback Forward: Innovation and Opportunity, UNSW, 09 May 2014 - 09 May 2014
    Creative Written Works | 2014
    Lorange A, 2014, Embarrassment, Glitch, Poetry, Embarrassment, Glitch, Poetry, dasSUPERPAPER
    Creative Written Works | 2014
    Lorange A, 2014, FOOD TURNS INTO BLOOD, FOOD TURNS INTO BLOOD, Gauss-PDF
    Creative Written Works | 2014
    Lorange A, 2014, On Language as Material, On Language as Material, dasSUPERPAPER
    Creative Written Works | 2014
    Lorange A, 2014, Pathetic Tower, Pathetic Tower, Make Now Press
    Creative Works (non-textual) | 2014
    Milledge C; Lorange A; Hinterding J, 2014, Psychomagic: Dead Matters, Psychomagic: Dead Matters, 55 Sydenham Rd. Sydney, Australia, 19 September 2014 - 05 October 2014, at: http://www.55sydenhamrd.com/psychomagic-deadmatters
    Creative Written Works | 2013
    Lorange A, 2013, One That Made It Alike, One That Made It Alike, Vagabond Press
  • Media | 2021
    Lazzaro Rezende L; Lorange A; Segura J; Soto Román C; Leong M, 2021, Fugitive Paperwork: Documentary Practices in Literature, Art and History, Media Futures Hub, UNSW School of Arts & Media, , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYpA4CGxwdk
    Media | 2021
    Lorange A; Segura J; Soto Román C; Leong M, 2021, Fugitive Paperwork: Documentary Practices in Literature, Art and History’, UNSW Media Futures Hub, Australia, , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYpA4CGxwdk

My Research Supervision

PhD:

Miska Mandic. Research area: time-based art, ecology, waste. Supervised jointly with Dr Bianca Hester.

Rachel Schenberg. Research area: poetry and poetics, translation, social theory, lyric subjectivity. 

Alex Moulis. Research area: screen-based media, settler-colonialism, nationhood, affect. Supervised jointly with Dr Nicholas Apoifis.

Toyah Webb. Research area: poetry and poetics, literary studies, psychoanalysis, cultural theory. 

Skye Wagner. Research area: photography and photomedia, assemblage, affect, theories of the image. Supervised jointly with Dr Grant Stevens.

 

MFA:

 

Completed candidates:

Marian Tubbs, What the Material Reveals: How the Poor Form Critiques Cultural Ascriptions of Value, PhD, 2015 (jointly supervised with Professor Jill Bennett)

Penelope Benton, The Icing on the Cake, MFA, 2015

Theresa Darmody, The Continuous Line: Transcoding knitted stitch patterns through painting in an investigation of the affective potential of pattern, MFA, 2015 (jointly supervised with Dr David Eastwood)

Monika Behrens, Reimaging Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life: a Transformation into Contemporary Painting, PhD, 2017 (jointly supervised with Professor Jill Bennett)

Melinda Reid, On Transpedagogy: Recent experiments at the intersections of art and pedagogy, PhD, 2018 (jointly supervised with Dr Gay McDonald)

EO Gill, Becoming Video: Indeterminacy, Intimacy, Image, MFA, 2018

Chelsea Lehmann, The Articulate Surface: Painting and the Latent Image, PhD, 2019

Elena Gomez, Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt: Gender, Labour, and Intergenerationality in Marxist-feminist Poetics, MFA, 2019 (jointly supervised with Dr Verónica Tello)

Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Shanzhai Style in Artistic Practice: Mythologising Creativity and Ownership in The Global Rise of China, MFA, 2020 (jointly supervised with Dr Diana Baker Smith

Sarah Jones, Publishing as Process: The essay as system and as swerve, PhD, 2021

Spence Messih. Double Bind: (Trans)materiality and Tactics of Abstraction, PhD, 2022 (jointly supervised with Dr Rochelle Haley)

Vaughan Wozniak-O'Connor. Site, Data, Materials: Artistic approaches to self-tracking data, PhD, 2022 (jointly supervised with Dr Kate Dunn)

Costanza Bergo, Atlas of Denial: Australian Landscape and the Settler-Colonial Structure of Feeling, PhD, 2022 (jointly supervised with Dr Tim Gregory) 

Chelsea Hart, “They Call it Love: Ideology and reproductive labour struggles during Covid-19 lockdowns in Victoria”, Master of Art (Research), 2023 (jointly supervised with Dr Andrew Brooks) 

Angus McGrath, I Fall Deeper and Deeper the Further I Go: Circluding at the Threshold, or, A Script For The Closet, MFA, (jointly supervised with Dr Andrew Brooks) 

Melody Newell, ‘Kitsch Sites’: mythmaking and the Snowy Mountains Scheme, MFA, 2024