John Mateer is a critic and curator. Since the 1990s he has contributed to most Australian magazines as well as to international publications. He was the inaugural Australia Council art-writer in residence in London, and has been a guest lecturer at Maumaus art school in Lisbon. He has curated two large-scale exhibitions: In Confidence: Reorientations in Recent Art for Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, and for the John Curtin Gallery Invisible Genres. The latter is documented in Invisible Genres: Two Essays on Iconoclasm, a book written with the Dutch art historian Arvi Wattel. The Quiet Slave: a History in Eight Episodes, his research project with the Malay community of the Cocos (Keeling) Atoll, has been presented at universities in London, Lisbon, Vienna and Sydney, and at the Western Australian Museum. Its bilingual (English/Malay) book is being translated into German. Currently, he is compiling an archive of his art criticism, writing essays and developing several exhibition projects and a program of feature-length films made by artists.
