QUICK NEWS BITES
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TOP REVIEWS FOR THE WEEK
FUNDING NEWS
National Art School joins State Heritage Register
The former Darlinghurst Gaol, now the National Art School, has been listed on the State Heritage Register for its historical and cultural history. NAS’s walls were constructed in the early 1820s. The school is currently undergoing an $18 million conservation program.
Minister for the Arts Don Harwin said the listing was a significant move to preserve and conserve the site for future generations, adding that in addition to its history as a gaol, it has produced many distinguished artists.
Powerhouse Parramatta gets green light
The NSW Government has granted planning consent for Powerhouse Parramatta, allowing the building works to commence on the Moreau Kusunoki and Genton designed building.
Powerhouse Chief Executive Lisa Havilah said: ‘Powerhouse Parramatta is the largest cultural investment since the Sydney Opera House and planning approval marks a transformative cultural moment.’
City of Parramatta Lord Mayor Cr Bob Dwyer added: ‘Powerhouse Parramatta will be a game-changer for our City. Not only will it create more than 4,000 jobs, but it will attract up to two million visitors a year and inject millions of dollars into the economy.’
Read: In the face of green bans and protests, Powerhouse Museum rethinks future
Opportunities
Artists keen to create new projects co-designed with kids and for kids are being sought to participate in the ArtPlay 2021 New Ideas Lab. Supporting proposals between $10,000 and $20,000, projects must appeal from babies to 13-year-olds. All disciplines, all abilities and all cultural backgrounds are encouraged. Expressions of interest close Friday 26 March. Visit the ArtPlay New Ideas Lab.
Outer Space has been selected to activate the Judith Wright Arts Centre gallery in 2021. The not-for-profit contemporary art organisation was chosen through an Arts Queensland Expression of Interest process and the engagement comes with a supporting programming budget of up to $100,000. Artist and curator applications for the 2021 Exhibition Program are open (closing 21 March), and the first exhibition will open in April.
TALKS and EVENTS
PERFORMANCE: skullduggery is a newly commissioned work to be performed by the Jannawi Dance Clan within Judy Watson’s exhibition at Artspace. Jannawi is an Aboriginal dance company that centres on Indigenous storytelling through dance and performance. The work responds to Watson's research into the early 1930s theft of a skull and king plate from the grave of Aboriginal man Tiger, known as ‘King of the Mines’ in northwest Queensland. Performances run from 26-28 February at 3pm daily.
EVENT: On the last Sunday of every month, Supper Sessions is setting the table for a feast cooked by a renowned guest chef on the rooftop of 107 Projects in Redfern. All profits are pooled into an independent $1000 grant, awarded to an artist on the night to kick-start a creative project.
Supper Sessions launches on 28 February with a feast cooked by Anna Ugarte-Carral (Momofuku Seiōbo, Noma, Lyle’s and winner of the 2020 Josephine Pignolet young chef award). This dinner will launch the project and applications for Supper Session grant #1 will open on the night.
TALK: Penrith Performing & Visual Arts and Women with Altitude are presenting two panel discussion for International Women’s Day: Women Out West! A string quartet from Penrith Symphony Orchestra will perform as part of this event on Sunday 7 March, 3.30pm – 6.30pm, at Penrith Regional Gallery. Ticketed.
OPPORTUNITY: Applications are now open for the 2021 In Focus Curator Forum, presented by the Ballarat International Foto Biennale and supported by The Ian Potter Foundation. This professional development program is an exclusive opportunity for emerging and mid-career curators.
Held from 30 August – 2 September, to coincide with the 2021 Ballarat International Foto Biennale, a group of 10 curators will be selected. Participating curators will be required to commit to travel to Ballarat and stay for five nights. Over four days, expert and budding curators will present curatorial case studies and participate in innovative workshops and exchanges, all designed to interrogate curatorial practice, sustainability and envision the future. Applications close 7 March, with applicants notified 31 March.
FESTIVAL UPDATES
Quick Festival news
NSW: After a successful Summer Season at the State Theatre and a sold-out Wong Kar Wai retrospective (closing 18 February), Sydney Film Festival announced this week that its 68th edition will move to mid-year, taking place 18 – 29 August 2021 in cinemas.
The shift will allow the Festival to continue to include films from major international festivals (in addition to Australia’s best new feature films and documentaries) in a year of date fluctuations around the world due to COVID-19. Submissions for the Festival are currently being accepted through FilmFreeway and close on Friday 26 March.
TAS: Australia’s midwinter solstice festival Dark Mofo has announced its dates, returning to Hobart from 16–22 June 2021. David Walsh, Mona owner said: ‘Dark’s back, which, in the immortal words of Mark Spitz, who was also making a comeback, "could be good, could be great, could be terrible". Mark didn’t mention that there is another possibility: it could be cancelled. But it wouldn’t be worth doing if there was no risk. There’s lots of risk, so it must really be worth doing.’
Leigh Carmichael, Dark Mofo Creative Director added: ‘This year the festival will run for one week only from 16–22 June, making it smaller and more intense.’
There’s lots of risk, so it must really be worth doing.
- David Walsh, Mona
This year is the final year of the festival’s five-year agreement with the Tasmanian State Government. Dark Mofo’s future beyond this event isn’t clear or guaranteed.
‘The Hobart City Council have withdrawn financial support and this will impact the scope and scale of the Winter Feast, which will be reduced to five nights,’ Carmichael said.
‘While our future is a little uncertain, we are optimistic that there is enough gunpowder in the barrel to propel us into 2022.
‘We’re dropping all sponsorship activations, as we felt they were having a detrimental effect on the festival. While we’ve appreciated the support from many high profile brands, we want to be able to pursue our own cultural agenda free from restraint and with a renewed commitment to the art,’ Carmichael added.
QLD: The Gold Coast’s annual GC Laughs Festival has announced its comeback at HOTA on 13-21 March. Program announcements this week include Australian comedians Joel Creasey, Tommy Little, and Fiona O’Loughlin, who will take to the stage alongside some of the best local and international acts.
Read: The 2021 arts festivals and events calendar... for now
SKINDEEP, showing at NAS Gallery, Sydney. Geoff Ostling. Photo WADED.
AROUND THE GALLERIES
State-by-State highlights
NSW: The LGBTI community has a long and varied history with tattoos. At a time when it was illegal to be out and proud, many LGBTI people tattooed their body to convey secret messages or as an act of defiance to authority. For those who have been marked as ‘other’ for their gender and/or sexuality, the claiming of identity through tattoos has offered a powerful and cathartic ritual. SKIN DEEP reveals those intimate stories in a new exhibition curated by NAS Executive Producer Terese Casu. Running from 18 February – 7 March at NAS Gallery.
As part of SKIN DEEP, choreographer Meryl Tankard will work with community members and aerialist The Amazing Ari, to present a performance of movement and dance to slowly reveal the performers’ hidden body tattoos, while also unveiling secrets. The performance will be accompanied by early 19th Century arias of unrequited love and loss by The Song Company.
NSW: Hayley Millar Baker's (Gunditjmara) first early career survey exhibition is coming to UTS Gallery. There we were all in one place (13 April - 4 June) brings five bodies of work together for the first time to consider the ways in which Millar Baker uses photography and storytelling to re-author history and assert the authority of memory and experience across generations. Millar Baker’s layered photographic assemblages affirm Aboriginal experience and culture within the Australian Imaginary to form a complex image narrative of place, family, identity and survival.
SA: Guildhouse and Flinders University Museum of Art kickstart 2021 with a new exhibition of evocative performance videos by South Australian artist Ray Harris (pictured top). Ritual Nature explores actions in connection to cleansing and death.
Harris’ work is the result of a research-based residency investigating Flinders University Museum of Art’s mid-1960s and 1970s Australian and international Post-object and Documentation collection enabled by Guildhouse through The Collections Project.
Grounded in her quest to unpack the effects of profound sorrow and trauma, her works showcase meditative time-based actions that situate her body in dialogue with the environment, alluding to death and its associations with grief and loss, decay and dirtiness, and the possibilities of cleansing and transformation. In a nod to the international conceptual art movement that inspired them, Harris’ new videos will be presented in juxtaposition with works by Jill Orr, Mike Parr, Ken Unsworth, David Thorp and Mary Fish, among others from the FUMA’s collection.
QLD: The University of Queensland Art Museum will launch its 2021 creative program with the opening of exhibitions OCCURRENT AFFAIR: proppaNOW, The City of Ladies and DEMOS, from 13 February – 19 June.
OCCURRENT AFFAIR is a major exhibition featuring new and recent works by Brisbane-based Aboriginal artist collective proppaNOW, who have had a five-year hiatus to focus on their individual careers. Established in 2003, proppaNOW is one of Australia’s leading collectives exploring the politics of Aboriginal art and culture, and provoking, subverting and re-thinking what it means to be a ‘contemporary Aboriginal artist’.
WA: This year the Revealed WA Aboriginal Art Market will be an online event, to ensure it can take place regardless of unexpected COVID events. The Market runs 29 March – 1 April. Revealed is the only event where you can buy artworks from Western Australia’s remote and regional Aboriginal Art Centres and independent Aboriginal artists. To register.
However, Fremantle Art Centre is pleased to confirm that the Revealed Exhibition: New and Emerging WA Aboriginal Artists will be an in-person event, opening 25 March – 23 May. This year over 100 artists have been selected across painting, installation, textiles, photography, print media, video, jewellery, carving and sculpture.
Taloi Havini, Useful Arts 2021. 10 composite digital images; Light Source Commission, Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2021. Image © the artist.
VIC: Buxton Contemporary has announced the launch of its sixth Light Source commission: Taloi Havini’s Useful Arts (2021), a two-part work comprising a suite of images presented online, and an installation that will replicate a museum storeroom, presented at Buxton Contemporary. It will be launched online on 17 February.
Havini is a descendant of the Nakas clan of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. Her work is often a personal response to the politics of location, exploring contested sites and histories connected within Oceania and employing photography, sculpture, immersive video and mixed-media installations. This project takes its name, Useful Arts, from a chapter in an historical anthropological text.
REGIONAL: Mid-career artist Tai Snaith launches a unique podcast series and parallel exhibition A World of One’s Own at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (MPRG) from Saturday 6 March until Sunday 23 May 2021.
With a nod to Virginia Woolf’s iconic 1929 essay ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ Snaith presents a series of relaxed, colloquial conversations with a selection of female-identifying artists from MPRG’s works on paper collection. Artists include Elizabeth Gower, Katherine Hattam, Deborah Kelly, Lily Mae Martin, Fiona McMonagle, Sally Smart and Lisa Waup.
ON STAGE
Quick stage news
Due to the recent VIC lockdown, Victorian Opera has cancelled its opening night performance of Respighi’s The Sleeping Beauty on Saturday 20 February. They are hoping to recommence the production’s season on Tuesday 23 February.
In its bid to encourage more people to experience grand opera, Opera Australia is offering $20 tickets to 2,000 first time opera-goers to see its upcoming production of Puccini’s Tosca, which runs from 22 February – 13 March. Thanks to the generosity of the Susan and Isaac Wakil Foundation Access Program, Opera Australia is able to offer tickets for less than the price of a movie ticket. Those interested need to apply for tickets via a ballot system.
Lamb at The Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre. Image supplied.
State-by-State highlights
NSW: Critically acclaimed play Lamb by award winning playwright Jane Bodie is coming to The Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre from 12-13 March. Featuring original music by Mark Seymour (Hunters & Collectors), this production captures 40 years on an Australian sheep farm. It’s a bittersweet story that explores the world of three siblings born onto their parents’ property. It’s the story of lies and secrets kept, of loves lost and opportunities missed.
WA: The Augmented is a brand-new performance created by Spare Parts Puppet Theatre’s Associate Director Michael Barlow in collaboration with Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). This partnership is the only tertiary training program for puppetry in Australia.
Barlow says of The Augmented: ‘We have been inspired and challenged by ideas fr:om Artificial Intelligence and evolution, using object theatre and figure-based puppetry to tackle the big questions that AI presents for humanity.’ Spare Parts Puppet Theatre is in Fremantle; performances from 19-20 February.
TOURING: In 2021, Australia’s leading Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander performing arts company, Bangarra Dance Theatre, will present the world premiere of a powerful new contemporary program, SandSong: Stories from the Great Sandy Desert, in venues across Sydney, Canberra, Bendigo, Brisbane and Melbourne. 8 June - 4 September.
The work is created by Bangarra Dance Theatre in consultation with Wangkajunga/Walmajarri Elders from the Kimberley and Great Sandy Desert regions, SandSong has been choreographed by Bangarra Artistic Director, Stephen Page and Bangarra Associate Artistic Director, Frances Rings.
SandSong tells the unique story of the desert homelands of the Walmajarri, where between the 1920s and 1960s, Aboriginal people were removed off their Country and forced into hard labour. It will include immersive soundscapes composed by Steve Francis, stage designs by Jacob Nash, lighting designs by Nick Schlieper and costume designs by Jennifer Irwin. Bangarra’s 2021 national tour launches in Sydney 8 June. See when SandSong is coming to you.
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