Next Wave - Structural Integrity
Arts House, Meat Market, 5 Blackwood St, North Melbourne
Duration: 6 to 9pm
Arts House, Meat Market, 5 Blackwood St, North Melbourne
Duration: 12 to 8pm. (Sunday 30 May 12 to 5pm)
Transforming the Arts House Meat Market complex, Structural Integrity is a monumental and melancholic, World’s Fair-styled exhibition and residency project. Exploring independent arts cultures from across Australia and Asia, Structural Integrity includes the work of six Australian and five Asian Artist Run Initiatives (ARIs). The exhibition will be open every day of the Festival, and is Next Wave’s biggest and most ambitious engagement with the Asia-Pacific region in the Festival’s 25-year history.
Working on-site at the Meat Market in the month leading up to the Festival, each artist group will create a large-scale structure, or ‘pavilion’, inside this vast historical building. Taking wildly different forms, from faux architectural constructions, to new media laboratories, sound installations, public workshops, and many variations in between, the eleven pavilions will form a snapshot of emerging arts practice in today’s rapidly changing artistic and geo-cultural landscape. Some of the pavilions will house additional artworks, whilst others will simply exist as the artwork itself. Many invite public interaction, welcoming audiences into the lively and chaotic world that each structure represents.
The pavilion structure has long been loaded with cultural values and ideals: think of the grand expositions of the 19th Century, or of the Venice Biennale. With this in mind, each pavilion in Structural Integrity will be developed as an expression of the participating ARIs’ artistic principles, in relation to their particular cultural or geographic situation. Playfully questioning the values and ideals that motivated many of these grand international fairs and expositions, Structural Integrity examines national and local cultural identity through the lens of innovative contemporary arts practice, taking in the shared, as well as distinctive, characteristics of grass-roots artistic culture across the region. As both metaphoric and physical structures, the pavilions will be in turns playful, provocative, melancholic, speculative and rhetorical.
Supporters: Arts Victoria, City of Melbourne, Arts House, Australia Council for the Arts, Sidney Myer Fund, Australian Indonesia Institute, Australia Japan Foundation, Asialink, Harold Mitchell Foundation
Artist/s:
Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo, Japan
Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space, Brisbane, Australia
FELTspace, Adelaide, Australia
House of Natural Fiber, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Locksmith Project Space, Sydney, Australia
Post-Museum, Singapore
Six_a Artist Run Initiative, Hobart, Australia
Tutok, Manila, Philippines
Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, China
West Space, Melbourne, Australia
Y3K, Melbourne, Australia
FELTspace 'Adelaide - Crystal City'
The FELTspace pavilion is inspired by the contemporary urban/new age myth of ‘Adelaide Crystal City’. This myth is based on the idea that geographically the city of Adelaide is built on a large quartz crystal grid; quartz crystal being a natural attractor for the energy of the universe. Quartz crystal is said to draw the extreme ends of positive and negative energies, supposedly resulting in Adelaide’s reputation for producing genius and depravity in equal measure.
Whether in Adelaide or abroad, we at FELTspace always attempt to attune ourselves with the peculiar rhythms of our fair home city. For Structural Integrity FELTspace have tried to concentrate Adelaide crystal energy into the Meat Market building. Guided meditations, colour-aura elevator footage, strobe effected animated paintings, cellophane crystalline towers and musings from Adelaide poet/art critic Ken Bolton are amongst our crystal-inspired offerings.