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.
(PICTURE: Installation of Greatest Hits’ sculpture for the West Space pavilion in Structural Integrity.)
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.
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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
Read more about the artist/s ↓
About the artist/s:
Art Center Ongoing is a multifaceted art complex that introduces the work of must-see artists who are leading today’s trends in contemporary Japanese art. Alongside the main gallery space is a cafe and a bar – a communal space where visitors are invited to read old and new art books. The complex also includes a library booth that provides extensive information on artists, compiled by our own artist network. Art Center Ongoing actively develops special events such as symposiums and live events that search for the possibility of expression that is ongoing.
Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space
is a Brisbane based Artist Run Initiative which aims to engage with experimental and innovative artistic practice and support young and emerging artists. Boxcopy is dedicated to delivering a program that encourages critical engagement with a range of mediums, ideas and approaches to art practice.
FELTspace is an Artist Run Initiative established in 2008, with its exhibition space in Compton Street at the heart of Adelaide’s Central Market district. It has quickly become a centre for the emerging contemporary visual arts community and an important site for the development, exhibition and discussion of new work by emerging and recognised visual artists in South Australia. FELTspace is unique as the only ARI with a permanent site in Adelaide’s CBD dedicated to the promotion of contemporary visual arts practices. FELTspace has a focus on promoting emerging and early career artists, with opportunities for more established artists to show in a non-commercial and non-institutional space.
The current FELTspace committee is comprised of Annika Evans, Matt Huppatz, Monte Masi, Logan Macdonald, James Marshall and Brigid Noone. This group of emerging artists, writers and curators is committed to fostering the development of outstanding contemporary art in South Australia. As well as its commitment to the support, development and promotion of contemporary art and artists within SA, FELTspace is actively developing a national profile for South Australian contemporary art through interstate projects such as their recent ‘swap’ show with Seventh Gallery in Melbourne.
www.feltspace.org
The House of Natural Fiber (HONF), located in Yogyakarta, is a mobile, new-media art laboratory. HONF artists concentrate on the principles of critique and innovation. Since its inception in 1999, HONF has consistently focused on cultural development and new-media art, running numerous new-media art projects and workshops. In every project HONF concentrates on interactivity with people and environments, consistently striving towards the development of art with technology.
Locksmith Project Space
is a not?for?profit, Artist Run Initiative located on the border of Redfern and Alexandria in Sydney, Australia. The directorial committee consists of five young and emerging artists: Kenzee Patterson, Samuel Villalobos, Kenzie Larsen, Yasmin Smith and Rachel Fuller. Locksmith’s program includes exhibitions, as well as experimental sound and music nights, and film and video screenings. Locksmith Project Space has been operating for over two years and is a particularly unique model as it attempts to support young and emerging artists by providing our exhibiting artists with artist fees, rent?free exhibitions, and zero commission on work sold.
In 2009 we launched our bi-annual publication Locksmith Project, an independent, curated publication of local, national and international artists’ ideas and writing. Locksmith Project provides artists and writers with the opportunity to experiment with works-in-progress, initial ideas, research, sketches, plans and basically anything that constitutes making art work. Each issue of Locksmith Project is a limited edition of five hundred copies and is printed in Australia on 100% recycled paper using soy-based inks. Continuing our wholehearted support of artists, we also provide a fee to each of the contributors to Locksmith Project.
Post-Museum is an independent cultural and social space which seeks to examine contemporary life, promote the arts and connect people. It is a ground-up project initiated by Singaporean curatorial team p-10 and it opened in 2007.
We are located in two 1920s shop-houses in Little India, an exciting and truly historical and multi-cultural area in Singapore. Through its activities, Post-Museum aims to respond to its location and community as well as serve as a hub for local and international cultures. Located in our premises are Show Room (exhibition space), Food #03 (contemporary vegetarian café), Back Room (multi-purpose space), artists studios and offices.
Our activities cover many areas including art, design, architecture and work by Non Government Organisations. p-10 is the Resident Curatorial Team and is responsible for a large part of the art program. The other programs are organised by other motivated individuals who have interest and/or expertise in those areas. Our programs include local and international exhibitions; residency programmes for local and international talents; talks by local and international talents; workshops and classes; community projects; research and publishing.
the shop
, located in Beijing but conceived and produced by Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou, China, is a public space that takes a more organic view of art practices, surrounded as they are by daily processes. As a space of everyday experimentation and time accumulation, the shop will eventually not only contextualise but also produce reality.
As a hybrid small institution / gallery / shop / library / studio / theatre – in short, whatever the real content needs, rather than being classified by artificial forms – it is also connected to a kind of re-departure of 70s fluxus traditions and Chinese philosophy in a new context. Starting from real content means it doesn’t have to necessarily be ‘art’ first of all, but definitely that the frames that conventionally indicate as art that which happens in a space (invitations, openings, wiped-clean solo presentations, exhibition program) depend on the content, and invite negotiation.
Six_a inc is an Artist Run Initiative in North Hobart, Tasmania. Six_a inc. provides a supportive environment for artists to take risks and experiment within their practice, to receive constructive technical and curatorial assistance in their attainment of conceptual resolution. Six_a inc. encourages its raw, fresh, process-driven vision by encouraging artists to engage with evolutionary development between the stages of initial conception through to installation and exhibition. Six_a inc. will continue to support an inclusive art culture that incorporates a cross pollination of art, music, film, writing, sound and performance, and whenever possible, offer a platform for these different media to co-exist in dialogue, and without hierarchy.
Tutok is a contemporary artist collective that was established in Manila in 2005. At this time a core group of concerned artists came together to make a stand against the spate of extra-judicial killings that hit unrecognised, anonymous, and mostly rural Filipinos. Since then, this loosely-organised band of artists, headed by Manny Garibay and Karen Flores, has made it tradition to put together an exhibition on or around December 1, Human Rights Day. Tutok employs art as medium, message, and motivation to call attention to important socio-political issues affecting our daily lives, often collaborating with local Non Government Organisations and educational institutions.
Founded in 1993 in Footscray, West Space is an artist-run organisation enabling the activities of artists and fostering diverse communities of practice. West Space provides a critical context for artistic practices that are challenging, experimental and exploratory.
West Space presents a critically engaged artistic program, supporting a range of practices at various stages of research, generation and presentation. It engages practitioners working in a range of media and artforms, including visual arts, craft, writing, design, new music, sound, performance, multi and new media. At West Space, the term ‘program’ is used in its expanded sense. It refers to the activities of West Space – what is generated, produced, supported, researched, and presented – and not just in reference to exhibitions.
Y3K is a project-by-project, open-model contemporary art gallery, incorporating multi-functional spaces. It facilitates and curates group and solo expos, projects, retail, publishing, office, landscape, architecture, multi-disciplinary design, artist dinners, video and film screenings and other events. Y3K is a project run by artists which is engaged with independent and represented praxis, other art spaces and programs, institutions and various projects nationally and internationally.
Y3K is initiated and operated by James Deutsher and Christopher L G Hill.
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