The Drawing Room

How would you cope if you found yourself under lockdown, for months, in a small unit, with your mother and your ex?

That was precisely the situation that Neil Kramer found himself in when the Covid pandemic hit New York in 2020.

Over the weeks and months that followed, Neil let the world in on a version of his life through a series of humorous staged photos

That work, Quarantine in Queens, is one of the headline exhibits at the Head On Photo Festival.

Fifty-eight years ago, the US President John F Kennedy was assassinated in a motorcade in Dallas.

It remains one of the defining moments of the 20th Century.

But almost 6 decades after the event, why do so many questions still remain? And how have recently declassified documents changed the official narrative?

Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone has returned to the story of the assassination in a new documentary.

How would you behave at end of the world?

Rachel was a renown artist, but now she's retreated into a hermetic existence: no phone, no internet, and just a single contact with the outside world.

Then, one night, a young woman and her baby turn up at Rachel's house with a story of horror: an invisible threat has spread through the world and everyone is dying.

In the Drawing Room, Inga Simpson talks about writing a post-apocalyptic novel, and her own experience of the Black Summer fires.

From club collaborations to her own atmospheric folk music, Liz Martin has been putting out memorable music for a couple of decades now.

She's one of the artists featured in the Sydney Opera House's Liminal series, a collection of live concerts being streamed online now, and is the Interim CEO of Accessible Arts NSW

In the Drawing Room, Liz talks about performing to an empty room and the lessons the pandemic has taught her about online accessibility.

In the face of her concerns about big issues like climate change, Ramona Koval went in search of what it means to be human.

Looking to both the past and the future, Koval found recurring themes of collaboration, storytelling, and the ability to ask 'why'.

Twenty-six years ago, Garth Nix introduced readers to Sabriel and the world of the Old Kingdom: a land where necromancers raise the dead and one family straddles the boundaries of magic to stop their plans.

Now Nix is taking readers back to the days before Sabriel and introducing her parents, Terciel and Elinor, who have their own adventures to discover.

In a full-contact haunted escape room in Nebraska, contestants make their way through a series of violent cells.

In the final cell a prize awaits, but only if they can reach the end without using the safe word: Reprieve.

Only one team has ever reached the end.

Reprieve is the new horror novel by James Han Mattson, in which explores love, America, and racial fetishm.

What does it feel like to be completely free of constraints and unleash your creativity without restraint?

That's what singer songwriter Dami Im has been discovering while working on her new studio album My Reality.

While Ken Follett was researching his book Fall of Giants, he came to the realisation that no one had wanted World War I to happen. And yet, through a series of seemingly sensible decisions, it had happened anyway.

And, Follet says, "What it made me think was, could it happen again? And of course, whenever I have a thought like that, my next thought is 'could I write a story about it?'"

In the Drawing Room, Follett discusses the resulting novel, Never, and what it would take, in our age of information and international diplomacy, to start a truly global conflict.

When we look up into the night sky - what is looking back at us?

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work looks at mass surveillance, data collection and secret military bases. And he's the subject of a new documentary, Unseen Skies, by award-winning journalist Yaara Bou Melhem.