July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
F!NK Fostering Design (ACT) > ACT
Chances are that if you think about Australian design one of the first names likely to come to mind is F!NK, and its founder Robert Foster. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
The Next Wave Festival
By Megan Backhouse
The Next Wave Festival is all about youth, just look at the website and its talk of “genre-busting” and innovative works being tucked away in laneways and atypical spots by the river. There’s barely a soul associated with the event over 30 and Jeff Khan, the artistic director, has just turned 29.
Khan says Next Wave is no longer the “capital C community youth festival” it started out as in 1984, but has evolved into a “contemporary arts festival for innovative, critically engaged young artists”. With Khan at the helm, it has also become an event with a bigger visual arts emphasis than the standard arts festival, which means more than half of this year’s 61 projects are visual-arts-related.
Lots of them are, however, to quote the website again, “genre-busting” and Khan says if he had to choose something to sum up this year’s line-up, it would be the large number of works which cross over multiple art forms and contain an element of performance or interactivity.
Next Wave’s 2008 theme is ‘Closer Together’. While it can prompt ideas about global culture as a catalyst for both connectedness and confrontation, it can also apply to different art forms. And, as this year’s Telepathy Project suggests, this theme applies to people too. Sean Peoples and Veronica Kent, for instance, will be telepathically exchanging their thoughts for all to see in the specially decked-out front windows of the Flinders Street Forum Theatre. For four hours every evening, for five days straight, each of them will sit in their own vibrating cubicle writing down all thoughts communicated to them on time-coded Post-It notes which they will then stick on their windows.
The increasing tendency to live out our personal lives “in very impersonal arenas” is, Khan says, something the festival will examine more widely, as is the “demise of public space” and our feelings of claustrophobia as well as connectedness. As Kahn says, “The projects include a range of responses to the theme, from the utopian to the dark.”
One of the festival’s keynote projects is Membrane, a site specific exhibition taking place in some of the more obscure spots to be found in Federation Square, like garden beds, the spaces in between glass walls and a 20 metre long trench running below.
Ash Keating with guest artists, Study for 2020?, 2007, installation. Photo Ash Keating.
Courtesy of the artist and Dianne Tanzer Galleries.
Membrane is showcasing works from artist-run initiatives around Australia (such as Melbourne’s Utopian Slumps and Perth’s Breadbox Gallery). The project evolved from similar events at past incarnations of this biennial festival, like the Containers Village at the Docklands in 2006 and the art filled shipping containers in the Federation Square car
park in 2004.
“Artist-run projects generally fly under the radar of the general public and so we are giving them a more public platform,” Khan says. The same could be said for Kirsty Hulm’s blue neon text, “Imagine me and you, I do”, that will be writ large across the exterior of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Other venues, however, will be a bit more secluded. For their nightclub project, for example, Next Wave will be taking over the pole-dancing stage and lap-dancing cubicles of a city strip club, with the architecture
feeding into a series of visual, performance and sound works.
Similarly, lots of the exhibitions in galleries won’t be in the obvious, traditionally used bits. The 20 artists participating in Objects in Space (including, for instance, Simon Pericich and Alex Martinis Roe) have used stairwells, bookshelves and back windows to show their videos and installations, while, at the NGV’s Ian Potter Centre, Danielle Freakley will present an alternative audio soundtrack for some of the gallery’s best known works.
In other exhibitions around town, Mel Upton has cast in silver and plastic the rubbish she has picked out of gutters, and David Short has individually packaged and priced the dirt he has dug up from 99 suburbs across Melbourne. As part of a cultural exchange involving
international artist residencies and public interventions, New Zealander Liz Allan will develop a free ‘school’ within the geographical borders of the Victorian College of the Arts.
Khan says the curatorial committee received more than 200 applications from young artists to show works at the festival, which in the past has included pieces by the now more established (but still not quite elderly) likes of David Noonan and Emily Floyd. There are also several shows which were put together by festival organizers.
“We will be presenting the best works being made by emerging artists,” says Kahn, “And we are also giving artists the opportunity to make ambitious works on a big scale, in a way that represents a leap forward in their practice.”
Sean Peoples, Veronica Kent, The Telepathy Project, 2007.
Photo Michelle Tran. Courtesy of the artists.
The Next Wave Festival – Venues across Melbourne 15 to 31 May
Megan Backhouse is a Melbourne-based journalist who has been writing about the visual arts for more than 10 years.
