Artlink publishes three thematic magazines (in print and digital formats) each year which are responsive to current art world topics and big ideas.

Narrative + Painting
Issue 45:1 Parnati–Kudlila / Autumn–Winter (April–July 2025)

Edited by Una Rey, this issue digs into ideas of narrative and painting in art from Australasia. Among the first and most universal genres of visual art, "narrative painting" has long been an exalted vehicle for engaging the world through storytelling. However, since the mid-twentieth century, the long-term marriage of painting and narrative has endured a critical environment, first due to formalist and conceptualist criticism, followed by successive waves of new media and relational practice: all have challenged painting's relevance as a medium for critical ideas. 
Painters–artists of old and new guard–have refused to surrender to this fake news, continuing to insert aesthetic, cultural, philosophical, social and political narratives into their surfaces. Our writers–aka “the narrators”–push beyond the death/pulse/status of painting to examine how painters are constructing narratives today: inside, outside and alongside painting.

INDIGENOUS__TRACE
Issue 45:2 Wirltuti / Spring (August–November 2025)

Guest edited by Jessyca Hutchens (Palyku) and Zena Cumpston (Barkandji), TRACE explores practices which begin with what has been left behind — the echoes, residues, impressions and marks that give presence to the past. Rather than a focus on the historical or archival, such practices embody forms of continuity and the cyclical. This issue began from conversations around printmaking practices which are inherently intermedial (connected to other forms of mark making) and for which trace can provide a potent material and conceptual metaphor. Against a continued discourse on Indigenous art and authenticity that centres direct marks made by the hand of the artist, we turn towards forms of repetition, iteration, mediation and of re-tracing the ancestral.