Friend/free (to love)

10 September - 18 October 2025

Curated by Alice McCool and Ena Grozdanić

Bus Projects, Melbourne VIC

In English, ‘friend’ and ‘free’ share the same root: frēon, meaning ‘to love.’ This shared etymology is expressed in friendship as an open and ongoing encounter that is inherently anarchic and exists outside of property relations: friendship is an affinity not tethered to bloodlines or sexual affiliations. It is a way of being free from the logics of possession, a framework for sharing, extending, co-constituting.

‘Friend/free (to love)’ brings together eight artistic comrades to ask: how do works created by friends speak to one another? Can friendship trouble the connection between art and property? Can friends redefine and renegotiate conventions of aesthetic autonomy through the process of reciprocal creative labour?

To think about friendship as a framework for analysis is to make a demand towards the future: it is to enunciate the desirable conditions that friendship produces and how these conditions can activate the cracks in the established order. What is it about friendship that can free us, and why are both words acts of love?

‘Friend / free (to love)’ is curated by Alice McCool and Ena Grozdanić. It features the work of Yusuf Ali Hayat and Dominic Guerrera, Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks (Snack Syndicate), Sanja Grozdanić and Jelena Luise, and Hen Vaughan and Georgia Oatley.

Images credit: Installation view. ‘Friend/free (to love)’, exhibition at Bus Projects, 2025. Photography by Sebastian Kainey.

Sometimes I start the car just to spin the wheels,

but now we’re really driving. The accident

of our meeting. Mouth round like an o

as tho to feign surprise

that gravity brought us together

when really I don’t know how it happened

we speak each other’s language, but the miracle

is learning how to talk.

Mouth round like an orange.

Tonight you arrive pointing to the moon

We share the same sky

but you have to wake up to see it.

The wild tulips require more effort.

Take a piece of string and pull it tightly

across the surface of the orange.

I take the way it segments

as a token of your affection

and eat the pith.

The ball has zero spin

We were never good

at playing team sports.

I mirror your steps without intending to,

before intending to. Throwing our shoulders into it

and soon we’ve traced a circle around ourselves.

They’re playing the song everyone wants to hear

just for us

and we keep stepping

like the horizon goes in every direction.

The scratched discs on the car floor

where did they go?

You probably know how difficult it is

to identify the different types of peaches

You need to go further out

If you can’t see the moon

I pass you the baseball glove

run further back, you say

I know you are there

in that single location

We move around each other,

rotating at a rate that matches the revolution

Thomas McCammon &

Alex Sutcliffe