Cybele Cox, Madi Feist, Isabella Hone-Saunders, Barrie Goddard, Emma Pham, Nick Santoro
’How to dismantle the world (and still feel good about yourself in the morning)’
5 February - 27 March, 2026
Public Programs:
Thursday 5 February: Exhibition Launch
Wednesday 18-20 February: Verge X PULP Arts Precinct at USU Welcome Fest
Thursday 5 March: The Great Post-Apocalyptic Debate
Wednesday 11 March: Echoes: How to dismantle the world…
Wednesday 18 March: In Conversation
Emma Pham, How to dismantle the world (and still feel good about yourself in the morning), 2025.
Can you feel it; the sticky malaise in the air? The world is going nowhere promising, fast. Is it possible to turn things around…by tearing everything apart?
This question sits at the heart of How to dismantle the world (and still feel good about yourself in the morning) the first collaboration between Verge and PULP Magazine of 2026.
How to dismantle the world... presents a range of propositions for a hopeless world. Using whimsy, satire, and humour, six artists and ten writers explore alternatives to dominant capitalist pedagogy, seeking to fill the gaps within the dominant chorus of voices shaping the current trajectory of earthly existence.
How to dismantle the world... encourages us to find the balance between challenging the world around us and engaging in the deconstruction of social systems and politics, without becoming disheartened or defeatist.
Not all hope is lost.
How to dismantle the world... runs concurrently with USU’s 2026 Welcome Fest.
Exhibition logo by Emma Pham.
About the artists
Cybele Cox
Cybele holds a Master of Fine Art from the Sydney College of Art (Australia), and a Bachelor of Fine Art from University of New South Wales Art & Design (Australia). Her work has been part of curated exhibitions across Australia including: Nothing Human is Alien to Me, curated by Elyse Goldfinch, Ideas Platform, Artspace Sydney; Romance Died Romantically, curated by Amy Marjoram at Strange Neighbour, Melbourne; and the Australian Ceramics Triennale. In 2017, Cox presented Ornamental Hallucination 1, a significant solo exhibition at Firstdraft, Sydney (Australia). After completing a residency at The Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (Austria) in 2017, Cox exhibited in Vienna and was a recipient of the 2018 One Year Studio Artist Program at Artspace, Sydney. She participated in the group exhibition, The Stand Ups, curated by Elyse Goldfinch at Bus Projects, Melbourne (March 2022) and the 2022 edition of the Australian Ceramics Triennale (July 2022), And at The Australian Centre of Contemporary Art (ACCA), in From the Other Side, curated by Jessical Clark and Elyse Goldfinch. Cybele has recently presented her 2nd solo exhibition at Ames Yavuz Gallery (Sydney) and is held at The Art Gallery of NSW, as a finalist in the prestigious Wynne Prize, 2025. A series of new works were presented at the recent Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, Carriageworks, followed by inclusion in a group show called Puppets! Everyone Love Puppets, presented in Melbourne by Oigall Projects.
Madi Feist
Working primarily across sculpture and assemblage, Madi Feist is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on Gadigal land. Her practice centres on collecting discarded materials, peculiar objects or mundane remnants of daily life. She transforms this “junk” into works that playfully dissect how consumerism shapes the way she observes the world. Intuition and chance play a key role in guiding her process, as she almost exclusively uses objects she encounters on the street or within the rhythms of her everyday life, prompting reflection on where objects come from, where they end up, and why they matter. Drawing on her Italian and Filipino heritage, Feist constructs humorous and symbolic narratives expressed through her sculptures, with references that range from ancient mythology to personal anecdotes. Her works mimic familiar forms, yet on closer inspection reveal an uncanny materiality that encourages viewers to reconsider what is deemed valuable or disposable.
In 2025, Feist was awarded Gosford Regional Gallery’s Emerging Art Prize and was a finalist in Burwood Art Prize and Hazelhurst Art On Paper Award. In 2024, she presented her first solo exhibition at Puzzle Gallery and participated in group shows at China Heights Gallery and Passport Gallery. In 2022, she was a finalist in The Remagine Art Prize at Wallarobba Arts and Cultural Centre. In 2021, she completed a Master of Fine Art from the National Art School, Darlinghurst, where she majored in painting. During her studies, was the recipient of the East Sydney Doctors Scholarship (2020) and the Derivan Prize for Mixed Media (2019).
Barrie Goddard
Barrie Goddard is one of South Australia's foremost landscape artists. Since the late 1960's he maintained his studio practice while continuing to teach at the South Australian School of Art 1963-1996, until retiring to work as a full time artist.
Isabella Hone-Saunders
Isabella Hone-Saunders is a curator, arts worker and artist, born on Kaurna Country/Adelaide, now living in Naarm/Melbourne. Their broader practice is concentrated on amplifying community and socially engaged practices and supporting artists in taking creative risks. The research projects Hone-Saunders has curated explore themes of habitat sharing, survival and extraction, to consider the interplay between human, animal, and ecological well-being. Currently they hold the role of Assistant Curator, Art Museums, the University of Melbourne. Formerly working as the Director of Seventh Gallery, Hone-Saunders has also held curatorial positions at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). Hone-Saunders has a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne and is a current PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash University. The core concept of Isabella's PhD research proposes hope as a generative and disciplined curatorial methodology and as a type of active recommitment that reorients despair and has the potential to cultivate new forms of solidarity.
Emma Pham
Emma Pham is an artist and arts worker based on Dharug and Dharawal lands in South-West Sydney. Her practice revolves around storytelling and narrative, often through game-inspired video work and digital animation. Using nostalgia as a whimsical point of departure, her practice wrestles with contested histories from a de-colonial and post-colonial perspective, and ideas of inherited histories.
Touching on stories within Western Sydney and beyond, Emma attempts to bridge the gap of cultural disconnection by leaning into play, self-invention and personal agency. Emma's storytelling involves the creation of kitschy and immersive pixel worlds, often rooted in personal/ family memories. The nostalgia evoked through pixel art aesthetics becomes mobilised in her work as a language and tool to explore the past, particularly in ways that resist status-quo narratives. Through this, she hopes to focus her practice on forging new pathways from the overlooked, in-between spaces of culture and history.
Nick Santoro
Nick Santoro is interested in the mundane and futile details of subcultures, trends and environments that he encounters. Through painting, he mashes together disparate references to people and places to create obscure scenes and exaggerated narratives. By recounting, celebrating and juxtaposing banal and prosaic images of everyday experience, he hopes to generate mysterious paintings where viewers can pick their own adventure.