As the name implies, the Project is a conceptual device of cauterisation, a way of exploring taboos, for investigating political anomalies, for venting dissatisfaction with social injustice.

[35] Buckley exhibited The Slaughterhouse Project: Alignment and Boundaries (L’Origine du monde) at the Australian Centre for Photography in 2013.

[37][38][39] He co-curated with Blair French Reading and Writing Rooms, which was a major 30-year survey of New Zealand-born, Canada-based artist Bruce Barber,[40] and was held in 2008 at Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney.

[41] The project was developed in conjunction with Manukau Institute of Technology and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts in Auckland, where a partner component of the exhibition opened in December of the same year.

His most recent curatorial project (co-curated with Helen Hyatt-Johnston,[42] Couplings, was shown in 2018 at the Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney, Australia.

[43] As a teacher at Sydney College of the Arts (1989–2017), Buckley has taught several generations of contemporary Australian artists working within painting, installation, performance and new media art, including Sean Lowry,[44] Kyle Jenkins,[45] Alex Gawronski,[46] Tony Schwensen,[47] Sarah Newall,[48] David Haines,[49] Mark Shorter,[50] Rowan Conroy,[51] Sylvia Schwenk,[52] Shaun Gladwell,[53] Ben Quilty,[54] Koji Ryui,[55] Justene Williams,[56] Bijana Jancic,[57] Dr Catherine Payne,[58] Bronwyn Bancroft,[59] Yiorgos Zafiriou,[60] and Salvatore Panatteri.

He is the editor, with John Conomos, of Republics of Ideas: Republicanism Culture Visual Arts (2001);[68] Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD and the Academy (2009),[69] Ecologies of Invention (2013),[70] Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory (2015),[71] Who Runs the Artworld: Money, Power and Ethics (2017),[72] and A Companion to Curation (2020).