QUICK NEWS BITES
Our most-read stories this week were:
FUNDING NEWS
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Seven organisations have been announced as successful recipients of the Australia Government’s Regional Arts Fund (RAF) Recovery Grants in NSW, each receiving a share in $371,603 to deliver arts projects across regional NSW. They are:
- Outback Arts for Living Arts & Culture – Unplugged
- Cementa Inc.: Regional Artist Mentoring Program 2021
- Country Music Association of Australia Inc.: AcademyX
- Arcadian Creative Management for Gumbaynggirr Music Futures
- Spaghetti Circus Inc. to deliver Ringside Restart – Mullumbimby Circus Festival Artistic Program
- The Wired Lab: The Church – Conversion and Commission
- SMOKE co-authored by Jade Dewi to reignite dance theatre works
Announced 27 January, ten regional Western Australian creative projects will receive an investment of $247,387 through the Regional Arts Fund (RAF) Recovery Boost; a funding initiative managed in Western Australia by Regional Arts WA.
The recipients are: Arts Margaret River; Bunbury Fringe; Christopher Young; Mara Arts Aboriginal Corporation; Nannup Music Festival: Nannup Music Club; North Midlands Creative Community Days: The North Midlands Project; Southern Forest Arts’ project Mycelium: Co-designed; Stage Left Theatre Troupe for delivery of Professional Theatre Arts Workshops in Kalgoorlie; The Junction Co for their Pilbara Public Artists Development Program, and York Arts & Events for a pilot community arts program.
TALKS and EVENTS
Artlands has announced the continuation of its Conversation Series in 2021, with an in-person gathering planned for September. To kick off, join Artslands on 3 February for “Beyond the Biennale”. In March, Regional Arts Fellowship recipient Alex Wisser will talk about the role art plays in reinforcing the cohesion of a community. In May a panel explores the relationship between self, practice and place. Check out the Artlands Conversation Series website to register.
Craft Victoria will launch Making It, an online symposium on 21 February, exploring how craft is evolving in the 21st century through themes of collaboration, sustainability and wearable technology. If you haven’t already, check out the list of keynote speakers.
The Sydney organisation SAMAG will host a panel of speakers exploring the changing landscape of gender and sexuality and how this is playing out in our cultural institutions. The Beyond the Binary discussion will be led by panelists Jeff Khan, Dino Dimitriadis, Jain Moralee and Tea Uglow and is presented in-person at the National Art School, and virtually via Zoom on 22 February from 6-8pm. Presented in association with Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras 2021
As the Pre-Budget Submissions 29 January deadline approaches, NAVA is working to ensure that the Federal Government invests ambitiously and fairly in the Australian arts industry. They are calling for your contribution via a 2-minute survey. Please contribute before 28 January, so our sector will be heard.
FESTIVAL UPDATES
There are only two weeks left to apply to be part of the annual SWELL Sculpture Festival, with over $27,000 in prize money up for grabs. Here’s how. SWELL is Queensland’s largest outdoor sculpture exhibition and will be held this year 10 – 19 September 2021. Entries close 31 January.
The National Folk Festival (NFF) will present a new folk event in Queanbeyan (NSW) this Easter in lieu of the traditional folk festival at EPIC due to COVID-19 restrictions. Good Folk will feature a diverse program of 22 concerts spread throughout three iconic Queanbeyan venues from 3-4 April.
Four Winds has announced its 2021 festival program, to be held from 2 April. From English Baroque to Candelo folk, Middle Eastern song to contemporary dance, ancient Yuin culture and ancient Greek tales to romantic poetry and Ravel piano trios, the Four Winds Festival is a cornucopia of culture in the heart of NSW’s South Coast. Program details and registration.
Recently Awarded with an Australia Day honour, Four Winds Creative Director, Lindy Hume said, ‘This is the perfect place for us to gather and reconnect with each other, with nature, with music, with the world.’
Hume has had a busy week, with her second program for the pan-Tasmanian festival Ten Days on the Island also launched this week. Running from 5–21 March across the state, the festival is designed to ignite connections with communities from St Helens to Zeehan and Stanley to Sorell as well as Burnie, Launceston and Hobart.
First Nations will be strongly represented with Hide the Dog, a new trans-Tasman creation from lutruwita/Tasmanian playwright Nathan Maynard (pakana) and writer Jamie McCaskill (Māori) that will be an experience for the whole family. Alongside this work is Sinsa Mansell’s new solo dance theatre piece, BACK. Other highlights include the return of Robyn Archer AO, the inaugural Artistic Director of Ten Days, performing a new work, Mother Archer’s Cabaret for Dark Times, at Hobart’s Odeon; the signature project If These Halls Could Talk which will take audiences from the Western wilds in Zeehan, through Rowella, Scottsdale, Liffey, Ross and St Helens, to Sorell and Glen Huon; and The Marvellous Corricks, celebrating a band of family entertainers who travelled the world in the early 20th century at the Princess Theatre in Launceston.
‘Creating the 2021 edition of Ten Days on the Island has been a festival-making journey unlike any other. We are proud to present a program that celebrates the brilliance, innovation and ingenuity of lutruwita/Tasmania’s global local artists. I thank the artists who have shown great faith and passion in creating work for our Festival and welcome audiences to celebrate with them,’ Hume said.
AROUND THE GALLERIES
Unsung heroes of our galleries
Fremantle Arts Centre’s 2021 Perth Festival Exhibition, A Forest of Hooks and Nails, sees the organisation’s install team, a crew of ten multidisciplinary artists juggling casual work while establishing their own practices, step into the spotlight and present new works which explore FAC’s iconic building and history with their unique insider knowledge. 4 February –14 March.
Curator Tom Freeman conceived A Forest of Hooks and Nails during FAC’s 2020 shutdown as a means of supporting the team. He said: ‘Conversations during tea breaks always circle back to our latest artistic pursuits and they reveal the depth of consideration the install staff give to each of the artworks and artists they work with here.’
Perth Festival Visual Arts Program Associate Gemma Weston added: ‘This Festival is an important moment to celebrate and to deepen understanding of all facets of creative work, especially in light of gallery shutdowns during 2020, which had serious impacts for casual arts workers – so many of whom are artists.’
Gertrude Contemporary returns with chewy program
Gertrude Contemporary will presented Monumental – a new suite of works by Amrita Hepi that casts a central colonial figure within a continual sunrise… or is it a sunset? By creating a dreamscape of dance and demise, Hepi sets her sights on the historical archive of colonial monuments, where the structure serenaded by sound and dance, then destroyed by paddles and cricket bats, and finally replaced by seven people. making them bodily once more.
In the second gallery Lara Chamas takes a quote from The Prophet Muhammad, The entrance to Paradise lies at your mother’s hands, as title for her exhibition. This exhibition focuses on the matriarchs of the artist’s family lineage, their lives and stories, and sharing of knowledge, informing our identity. Lara Chamas is a first generation Australian-Lebanese artist, based in Melbourne. Both exhibitions are showing 6 February – 28 March.
Survey by 92-year-old artist
Painted over 70 years between 1958 and 2020, Jack, John and Kempsey is a survey by 92-year-old Jack Featherstone which opens at Tuggeranong Arts Centre on 6 February. Described as a “Magic Realist”, Featherstone is a Braidwood-based self-taught artist, who has diarised his life in paintings. Jack, John and Kempsey will be officially opened by ACT Minister for the Arts, Ms Tara Cheyne. The exhibition continues until 27 March, 2021.
Heath Franco, Home Town Two 2016, video still. The Lock-Up. Image supplied.
False Sense of Security
A new group exhibition opening at The Lock-Up in Newcastle (NSW) explores the subjectivity, privilege and hidden cost of our perceived safety. False Sense of Security considers our response when things push up against the limits of our control and the way fear can be leveraged for power, or used to justify actions that would normally be considered unethical. Curated by Halinka Orzulok, it features artists Fernando do Campo, Heath Franco, Doug Heslop, Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg, Halinka Orszulok, Giselle Stanborough and Shevaun Wright. Showing from 6 February – 11 April.
Exhibition compares Australia with global efforts to address colonial trauma
The Image is not Nothing (Concrete Archives) is an exhibition looking at the acts of genocide that have occurred in Australia since colonisation, and which are routinely overlooked or disregarded; traumas that Australia as a nation has not yet processed. Presented as part of the 2021 Adelaide Festival program, the exhibition will run from 26 February – 24 April at ACE Open with the work of 20 artists.
The exhibition is the result of curators Lisa Radford and Yhonnie Scarce’s extensive field research. Pre-pandemic, Radford and Scarce travelled across the world to visit sites imbued with significant histories of devastation, including Auschwitz, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Hiroshima, Maralinga, New York, Wounded Knee and former Yugoslavia.
‘The intention of our research was to discover what and how other countries and societies were dealing with trauma, genocide and nuclear colonisation, and how they represented it,’ says Scarce. ‘Australia has a long way to go in terms acknowledging the treatment of Aboriginal people when this country was colonised.’
Deadly Narratives
Deadly Narratives brings together Victorian stories represented by five years of art acquisitions to the Koori Heritage Trust Collection. Deadly Narratives also celebrates the KHT’s fifth year at Federation Square, and showcases the unique and important place the Koorie Heritage Trust Collection holds in Victoria and nation-wide, through key acquisitions. 13 March – 30 May.
Exhibition celebrates photographer Mervyn Bishop
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) will celebrate Mervyn Bishop, one of Australia’s most prolific and influential photographers, with a new exhibition opening in Canberra, 5 March – 1 August 2021.
Bishop’s images of culture, politics and people have significantly influenced our collective understanding of Australia’s history. This exhibition is drawn from the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) collection, the artist’s private archive, and enriched by sound and moving image from the NFSA. Bishop was Australia’s first Aboriginal press photographer. Spanning the past 60 years, the exhibition was developed by AGNSW, with new additions from NGSA for Canberra audiences. Tickets available from 15 February.
Quick gallery call outs
Contemporary Art Tasmania Project Space presents Dexter Rosengrave’s exhibition In the wake of your loudness, new experimental works exploring deterioration, turbulence, loss and volatility in personal relationships. Their works are often large-scale, created through bodily gestures and a shifting relationship to language and the self. 23 January – 28 February
Neridah Stockley: A Secular View opens at Western Plains Cultural Centre on 29 January, and brings together 120 works spanning more than two decades, from the 1990s to the present, of Northern Territory based artist. Landscapes meld into deceptively simple compositions – geographically precise they are topographically anchored.
Mike Reed’s exhibition, 3000 Streets, literally takes the camera to the street to capture unique, unrepeatable moment in times across 35 years – a slice of honest reality, unstaged, and often comical. No Photoshopping, Instagram or Snapchat filters either, and shooting always with a camera and not a phone. Showing 16 – 27 February at Melbourne’s fortyfivedownstairs.
In Sydney, another photography show has opened, The Business of Photography: the 19th century studio, at University of Sydney’s new Chau Chak Wing Museum, which delves into the heyday of commercial studio photography. On now, until 22 August 2021.
Pierre Mukeba, Impartiality, 2018. Courtesy the artist and GAGProjects.
Artist Pierre Mukeba has been being featured in the New York Times – Style Magazine in an article entitled ‘Portraits of Strength’. Mukeba is currently in the NGV Triennial 2020.
Australian National University School of Art & Design Gallery will presented JamFactory ICON exhibition, Angela Valamanesh: About being here. Inspired by the symbiosis between science and poetry, and primarily known for her biomorphic ceramic sculptures, this exhibition also celebrates the artist’s evocative drawings, watercolours, and mixed media works from her developing style of the late 1990s until present. From 10 February – 12 March 2021.
ON STAGE
Marooned
Playwright Michael Gray Griffith is the co-founder of The Wolves, a Melbourne based theatre company. Unfunded and initially rehearsed in a living room, their production Marooned has toured regional Victoria where it attracted standing ovations and a loyal following. Marooned will now have a Sydney season at Paddington RSL, 4 – 5 March. Marooned is the first play in Australian theatre history to be picked up by the Australian Army, who intend to tour it to several of their bases.
New La Boite production
Audiences are in for a gut-wrenching, psychological thrill-ride with Naked & Screaming, coming to La Boite from 6-27 February. See the world premiere of playwright Mark Rogers’ new Australian family drama, which follows the lives of new parents Emily and Simon, played by acclaimed Queensland actors Emily Burton and Jackson McGovern.
DIЯT, Holden Street Theatres. Image supplied.
A Russian and an Australian walk into a bar in Moscow. Neither are who they say they are. Award-winning theatre maker Patrick Livesey returns to Holden Street Theatres from 18 February – 21 March for the 2021 Adelaide Fringe with the world-premiere of DIЯT. Written by emerging queer playwright Angus Cameron and directed by lifetime member of the Actor’s Studio, Bronwen Coleman, DIЯT is described as ‘a thrilling and seductive exploration of queer persecution set against the horrors of the Chechen Gay Purges’.
Feminist theatre
Lady Great Theatre Company is presenting Compelled, a feminist piece of theatre exploring the phenomenon of exorcisms (that still happen around the world) as a metaphor for abusive relationships, and how one lives possessed by the voices of abusers. The show is written and directed by Fringe veteran, Michelle Endersbee, who believe the subject is very timely, given the pandemic unfortunately has revealed the scope of the problem of domestic violence. The season is 8 performances long, 6-13 February at Hayman Theatre, Perth, as part of Fringe World.
Mentoring that leads to the stage
Darebin Arts Speakeasy gives ten emerging artists aged 15 to 25 the keys to Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre for Let’s Take Over, 19 and 20 February. Participants have been given professional development through a series of guest speakers over several months, a budget and support to create and produce their own monumental arts event. All participants are paid and develop skills covering marketing, budgeting, programming and curation.
The 2021 Participants are: Amarachi Okorom, Anna Charalambous, Casper Plum, Elijah Eastley, Guy Ritani, Kenita Bush, Lauren Rosenberg, Lulu Fitz, Michaela Mulenga and Rhoda Makur.
No Intermission returns in 2021
After an inaugural season in 2019, and a brief COVID-induced intermission in 2020, NO: INTERMISSION is back for 2021 with a series of fresh new works for the stage. This festival was created with the core mission of providing opportunities for Sydney’s emerging artists to work collaboratively on quality productions and to bring to the stages works from writers across the world that would mark their Sydney debut.
NO: INTERMISSION productions are sourced from an extensive submission process that is open to playwrights around the world. This season saw over 650 submissions from over 14 countries. The result is four diverse Australian premieres:
- Rattling the Keys by break-out Adelaide playwright, Zoe Muller and directed by Rosie Niven. 17 – 20 March
- In Their Footsteps by verbatim creators, Ashley Adelman and Infinite Variety Productions. This show makes its Australian premiere after an Off-Broadway premiere and a successful Edinburgh Fringe Festival run. 17 – 20 March
- Lipstick by Lane Stanley, making his Australian debut. 24 – 27 March
- Girl Shut Your Mouth by Gita Bezard. 24 – 27 March
In 2021, NO: INTERMISSION has something for everyone. From a striking Verbatim play about the women of the Vietnam War to a hilarious Queer Farce about finding love. View the full program. The Festival is presented at Chippen Street Theatre, Chippendale, Sydney.
