Kudos acknowledges and pays respect to the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation. They are the traditional custodians of the land Kudos operates on. We create, design, share, and exchange our work and knowledge on this important meeting place. We pay our respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to any First Nations people who engage with Kudos. This is and always will be Aboriginal land.
@ariannebulanos@_sooms_
loss:non:loss
Arianne Bulanos is a curator, writer and arts worker on unceded Dharug land. Recently completing a Master of Curating and Cultural Leadership at UNSW Art & Design, she was awarded the degree with Excellence and recognised on the 2024 UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture Dean’s List for academic excellence, reflecting her commitment to critical research and contemporary arts practice. Her practice centres on community-driven storytelling, diasporic identity and collaborative exhibition-making, with a particular interest in culturally informed curatorial methodologies and audience engagement. Recent projects include the exhibitions loss:non:loss (2026) at Airspace Projects and Observations in Oil (2026) at Liverpool Powerhouse. She is also a co-founder of CARRRY, a curator-run initiative focused on collective and community-minded curatorial practice. Her writing has been published in The Western and Framework, where she writes on contemporary art and commentary on the landscape of arts workers. In her 9 to 5, Arianne works in Artform Development at Creative Australia, supporting sector engagement initiatives, programs and projects across diverse contemporary arts practices.
Soomin Jeong is an emerging curator and writer from Seoul, South Korea, now working on unceded Gadigal land. She recently completed a Master of Curating and Cultural Leadership at UNSW Art & Design, and has gained experience across art administration and curatorial practice, including at Art Busan (2024), Sydney Writers’ Festival (2025), Radio Insomnia, and the Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group (2026). She approaches curating as a practice of shaping tender and open spaces of connection and care, fostering encounters and courageously proposing paths not yet mapped. She believes in the power of art to question, to care, and to carry unspoken memories.
The title loss:non:loss came from thinking about loss as something that is not necessarily an ending. The colon became important to us because it creates a pause between the words, but also a relationship. Loss and non-loss are not completely separate things. Something can be lost and still remain through memory, material, gesture or repetition. We became interested in this space between things, rather than trying to define loss as one fixed experience.
Kristone Capistrano’s work was one of the starting points for this conversation. His practice brings together grief, family, migration, labour and the body through materials and gestures that feel very physical. Sweeping, gathering, burning and erosion become ways of working through memory. There is something very honest about this labour, particularly in the way his works hold both exhaustion and tenderness. Works such as For Nanay (2024) and The Earth Melts Away (2024) carry personal and inherited memories without trying to make them feel resolved.
Eric Kang approaches memory from a different direction. His work considers urban environments, particularly Seoul and Wollongong, and the effects of industrialisation, construction and constant change. Ink, charcoal, hanji, tracing paper and banana paper become ways of recording these places. His works can feel rigid and architectural, but there is still a sense of instability in them, as though the places being remembered are always changing underneath the surface. We were interested in bringing these two practices together without forcing them to have the same story. There are obvious differences between the artists, in their materials, gestures and relationships to place, but there are also these quieter connections around memory, labour and what remains. Capistrano’s sweeping and gathering sits alongside Kang’s attention to construction and urban transformation. One moves through the body and the natural world, while the other looks closely at the built environment. For us, these differences became just as important as the similarities.
The curatorial process was also very personal. Rather than approaching the exhibition as curators who would simply interpret the artists’ work, Soomin and I wanted to stay in conversation with each other and with the artists. Throughout the process, we began writing physical letters to one another, responding to the works, our conversations and our own experiences of memory, grief, care and connection. These letters became part of the exhibition. They were not meant to be perfect or polished responses. They became another form of making, another way of leaving a trace. This led to you: from me, a letter-writing station where audiences could write to the artists, the curators, someone in their lives or themselves. We wanted the exhibition to have a space where people could slow down and leave something behind. The letters became a growing collection of thoughts, memories and feelings from people who encountered the exhibition. In some ways, the post box became another
artwork, not because we were controlling what went into it, but because we had no idea what people would choose to leave.
Slowness became something we kept returning to throughout the project. There is something different about writing something by hand, especially now when so much of our communication happens quickly and digitally. Your hand moves slower than your thoughts. You have to sit with what you are trying to say. A letter can also become a physical record of a moment, something that can be held onto after the conversation has ended.
This made me think about curating as something that can be less about presenting a finished idea and more about creating the conditions for relationships to happen. For me, loss:non:loss became a way of gathering. Gathering artworks, conversations, memories, letters and people, and allowing those things to sit alongside each other without needing to resolve them.
Ultimately, loss:non:loss is about what happens when something is no longer there, but somehow still is. A person can be absent but remain in a gesture. A place can change but still exist in memory. A material can carry the evidence of someone's labour. A letter can hold a feeling long after it was written. The exhibition sits in that space between loss and continuation, asking what we keep, what we leave behind, and what might continue through the simple act of making and remembering