The recent 'painting over' the large mural-esque images that make up much of Hosier Lane's artwork was an important critique of the co-option of street art and a commentary on who ascribes value. Its point was missed by the very people it sought to critique. That Melbourne City Council is now seeking to criminalise those artists demonstrates that their appreciation of street art dissipates when it presents a challenge to their authority.

Within this nuclear reality whose lives are seen as disposable? Whose bodies are rendered collateral? We do not yet have fully functioning artificial intelligence, nor replicants built to carry out the domination and appropriation of invasion. However, colonialism and capitalism have seen to it that androids have been made of humans: dehumanised, worked, hunted and killed. The survivors of apocalypses and nuclear disaster exist and continue to resist.

It is tableau that sprung to mind when I viewed Cameron Hayes’ immensely detailed painting ‘The Fight Between Moomba and Lent’, recently on display at the Australian Galleries in Sydney.

When looking through Liu’s lens, it’s not hard to start searching for the spectral absences that haunt this country. His work urges us to be diligent in seeing, in cautiously determining what and who deserve our ethical concern in the affronting yet normalised landscapes we occupy in an urbanising world.

We watched as the sharply uniformed carabiniere denied access to one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists – and of course, to an Aboriginal man – to the Australian Pavillion at the Venice Biennale.

Due to the extensive list of creative geniuses whose deaths were either caused or speculated to have been caused by the dreaded infection, syphilis acquired twisted positive connotations within European artistic circles during the Victorian era.

If the main purpose of my work was to educate white people, I would have seen it as a failure after being rejected twice by white art institutions. I would have seen it as a failure after the predominantly white attendees of the music and arts night drew penises and wrote jokes on my work.

Archiving my psychotic experiences has been a powerful act of restitution and sense-making. For the mad have always been narrated by psychiatry; their creations collected, annotated and curated by institutions and by people who have never experienced madness themselves.

Flight finishes in Melbourne on 21 October. But it is not the last time Australians will be presented with the lives, names, terrors and dreams of people seeking refuge. People like Aryan and Kabir, like Behrouz, like my family nearly 70 years ago.

After its absence in 2016, the biennial Melbourne Art Fair (M.A.F.) returned this year, spread across two venues in the Southbank Arts Precinct: Riding Hall, the newly refurbished stables at VCA, and Vault Hall, a bloody great tent erected on the ACCA Forecourt. M.A.F. saw forty galleries display works by the brightest and best in their respective stables, demonstrating the strength of the current Australian contemporary art scene to those who filed through.

There is the possibility of something new – an experience, a fleeting change in our way of seeing – under this highly ritualised passage under the arch. There is respite from ritual anaesthesia and habit, and also new fantasies within to which we might succumb: Magnificent Modernism beckons.

The strength of State of the Union lies in its multifaceted representation of the labour movement with consideration to gender, immigration and globalisation. In the current post-Brexit post-Trump climate, where these issues are often polarised against the white working class, this exhibition highlights instances where they’ve aligned.

Collaborations are difficult beasts to navigate at the best of times. When collaborators are coming from very different worlds, from very different ways of experiencing and understanding and making, the dynamic becomes all that more complicated, and all that more compelling.

As Tobin Siebers observed, ‘Art is the active site designed to explore and expand the spectrum of humanity that we will accept among us.’ Despite attempts to exclude disability from the art world, for Siebers it is central to the experience of ‘aesthetics’: how certain bodies make other bodies ‘feel’.

Urban studies researchers working with residents of Polish cities have found that common perceptions of smells in daily life reveal much about how people feel about change and place. The smells people notice are often linked to broader social, political and economic conditions. In Poland, for example, life smells less like the vegetables in grocery stores and the natural environment of the past under socialism, and more like the petrol stations and supermarket air conditioning of capitalism in the present.

The room is dark, the soundscape diminishes into silence, and a small archipelago of spectators are solemnly sprawled on beanbags in the gloom. On one of the three large screens, projected in a peculiar monochrome, a head-scarfed woman twists to face the camera – as she does, thin stalks of vegetation intrude into the shot, like wires.