Culture

Kate Holden After a decade of critical acclaim as Pikelet, musician Evelyn Ida Morris is releasing the first music under their own name – a grand suite of piano songs, both sung and speechless, about the experience of being non-binary. “Non-binary is very strange, because it’s about preserving that internal space, and feeling proud of it, and finding ways to communicate it.”

Kate Jinx Following the outrage over their “unAustralian” video opus Terror Nullius, artists Dominique and Dan Angeloro reflect on their collective practice as Soda_Jerk. “We always had this idea that we wanted Terror Nullius to be a film somewhere between the arthouse and grindhouse. A piece of art that embraces bad taste or maybe a piece of bad taste that aspires to be art.”

Steve Dow His first feature film, Lion, took movie-goers on an emotional journey across the world. Now director Garth Davis lends his visual poetry to the tale of one of history’s most famous women. “If you look into it, Mary Magdalene was a very significant apostle, and was present in all of the key elements, and sometimes mentioned more than other apostles. So she must have been a very significant person, and not the one that we’re learning about in Catholic school growing up. I thought it was amazing that it hadn’t been told.”

Kirsten Krauth Author Sarah Sentilles was once set on the priesthood, but she questioned church doctrine. Now her experimental writing interrogates state violence, using juxtaposition to expose the gaps in what we know. “If God is bigger than anything human beings can say about God, then all the things we say are going to fall short. So if you’re not questioning them, you’re actually engaged in idolatry of some kind. Doubt, to me, is very ethical.”

Romy Ash Satirist Armando Iannucci has turned from his hit TV comedies Veep and The Thick of It to mining the lethal absurdities of the Soviet Union for his film The Death of Stalin. He talks about the comedy of power. “It seems strangely topical with all the talk about facts and alternative facts, new truths and old truths, and the authoritarianism too. It’s frightening.”

Peter Craven Elijah Moshinsky’s interpretation of Verdi’s tragic masterpiece La Traviata has been wowing Opera Australia audiences since the ’90s. The latest iteration – both visually rich and lovingly handled by its stars – doesn’t let down the canon.

Dave Faulkner Confidence Man and Space Invadas both deliver refurbished R&B, but one polishes vintage grooves and the other delivers a fun-packed take on a ’90s dancefloor.

Lisa Radford A posthumous retrospective of Mutlu Çerkez’s work, structured by an idiosyncratic dating system of the artist’s devising, challenges concepts of when an artwork begins and ends.

Jennifer Down Unravelling Steve Coogan and The Trip to Spain.

Maxine Beneba Clarke Waiting for Peak Uncomfortable Gonzo with John Safran.

Omar J. Sakr A drive with founder of western Sydney literary collective Sweatshop, Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

Reviewer: EA When Clemantine Wamariya attended The Oprah Winfrey Show she seemed, on the surface, a normal American teenager: she was a cheerleader and lived with a prosperous, supportive family. But Wamariya, who had arrived in the United States aged 12 …

Reviewer: KN Gregory Day, like Tim Winton, is an Australian novelist connected with an Australian place. While Winton writes about Western Australia, Day’s points of reference typically lie along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. Like his earlier work, Day’s …

Reviewer: JR Australian novelist Gail Jones is no great spinner of yarns or master of mood and atmosphere, but she does have a unique feeling for the fascinations of the fragmentary. Her books brim with literary allusions, historical anecdotes, references to scholarly …