MELBOURNE DESIGN WEEK 2022

Transparent – Melbourne Design Week 2022

Curated by Misc Objet, Transparent explores how sustainable an object can really be. Thirteen emerging designers come together to produce an exhibition that reveals the sustainable and not-so-sustainable methods within their own practices. Documenting their processes they explore new materials, production methods and ways in which better their overall impact on the planet.

Contributors:
Aidan Renata, Billie Rivers, Bolaji Teniola, Casey Chong, Dalton Stewart, Jill Stevenson, Julian Leigh May, Lana Erneste, Lauren Lea Haynes, Mietta Greig-Hurting, Ryan Mueller, Sam Blomley, Tess Pirrie

Secure a ticket to attend the official opening of Transparent on Thursday, 17 March from 5:00pm until 9:00pm.

Opening event: 17 March 2022, 5:00pm–9:00pm (ticketed)
Dates: 18 March to 20 March 2022 (free entry)
Hours: Friday, 11:00–7:00pm, Saturday and Sunday, 10:00am–5:00pm

Jude Walton ‘Fugitive Bodies: Marking the Horizon’


Jude Walton presents Marking the Horizon at Missing Persons from 12 to 13 March 2022. The performances explore the resilience and resistance of the natural world, ways to process sensory information, and how we might interact in new and shared environments through movement and dance.

Marking the Horizon will be performed by Hillary Goldsmith and Siobhan McKenna
Sound: Jude Walton, Zapsplat, and Metro Tunnel construction
Zoom and Technical Assistance: Douglas Hassack
Collaborative Choreography: Jude Walton, Gesa Piper, Hillary Goldsmith and Siobhan McKenna

Find info and tickets here

Dates: 12–13 March 2022, 2:00pm and 4:00pm

GABRIELLA IMRICHOVA


Internal Architecture is a new performance piece by artist Gabriella Imrichova

Imrichova’s practice is first and foremost concerned with formal experimentation, process-focused making and the destabilisation of the viewer through “failing” devices for live performance.

In this new work, Imrichova is joined by performers Caitlin Dear, Hayley Does, Lucy Rossen, Mara Galagher, Romaine Mcsweeney, and Tiffany Fiorucci for two short-duration performances at Missing Persons. The public is welcome to attend. Internal Architecture requires a $5 payment at the door.

For international and interstate audiences, please note that this work will be live-streamed via the artist’s Instagram.

Date: Saturday, 19 February 2022
Hours: 3:30pm-4:00pm and 8:30-9:00pm AEDT

Untitled

ARTWEAR FESTIVAL

 Moss Tunstall, Alexandra Nemarič, Matt Finish, Troppo Print Studio, Henry Holder, Love Manifesto


 Melbourne artists reimagine their art to wear in ARTWEAR FESTIVAL, featuring one-off and collectible garments that are upcycled, patched, painted, printed, stained, hand-coloured, stitched, dyed and bleached using printmaking techniques and cellulose experiments that summon a punk aesthetic and sensibility.

Local, independent and a collective effort, ARTWEAR FESTIVAL blends art and fashion in this free, week-long celebration of the DIY spirit.

Dates: 1 to 7 December 2021. Attend on Facebook
Download a copy of the Press Release and Festival Program 

Papier-mâché


The translation of the French term papier-mâché is chewed paper: the satisfying transition of yesterday’s newspaper broken down and digested into a new sculptural form. It is a pulped and mashed material associated with ceremony, arts and crafts, masks and piñatas – a form that possesses an inherent potential of destruction, blind abandon, and the hollow promise of reward. Layers of the past, reimagined for a fragile future. 

Curated by Maddison Kitching and Louise Klerks, Papier-mâché brings together artists Rachel Ang, Fergus Binns, Matilda Davis, Jason Hamilton, Brendan Huntley, Maddison Kitching, Alasdair McLuckie, Nabilah Nordin, The Ryan Sisters and Isadora Vaughan. The artists, through a new medium or extension of their material expertise, engaged in refined child’s play. The tactile and organic process of cut and paste: there is no Command C, Command V shortcut in these claggy explorations. 

View the Exhibition Catalogue

Dates: 11 until 26 June 2021. Attend on Facebook
Hours: Thursday to Saturday from 12:00–6:00pm

Download a copy of the Press Release

 

Please Do Not Eat The Sculptures

Nabilah Nordin

Please Do Not Eat The Sculptures​ is a social gathering that brings together food, art and people.

Moving from the studio to the kitchen and back again, Nabilah Nordin brings her enduring fascination with texture, colour and form to a new series of works that sit somewhere between the abject and the delicious. Oozing gloops of icing and towers of toast meet enormous strings of spaghetti and wonky plastered structures. The hallmarks of Nordin’s practice – visceral curves, playful and naive mark-making, and impossibly exaggerated forms are intertwined with entrees, mains and desserts. Food serves as a new frontier for Nordin’s ongoing celebration of the sensuous qualities of the tactile and the endless possibilities of material invention.

The exhibition questions how both art and food work a type of “social magic” – they both bring people together and stimulate discussion, they lubricate social interactions and catalyse celebration, humour, and collaboration. Together with curator and friend, Sophie Prince, Nordin will explore the makings and boundaries of communities through the union of food and art.

Join us for Please Do Not Eat The Sculptures on the 8 May from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.

Dates: 8 May 2021. See Menu

Download the Press Release and Curatorial Statement

 

By Chance the Future

Amy Rudder 

LONDON. 2001. It’s the new millennium, with a minute more of pre-mobile phone, pre-terrorism hysteria, pre-social media life to live. Jackie escapes Sydney suburbia. She’s an outsider with a bad haircut. Wild mood swings. She knows everything. She knows nothing.

Why was Sef kicked out of the hostel?

Immigration detention, drum and bass, Berlusconi’s boys’ club. Spearmint Rhinos, capital cash flows, Stephen Lawrence’s murder … By Chance the Future is a story that shows how reflecting on where we were 20 years ago can tell us where we are today—at a distance, with hindsight—if only we look.

Amy Rudder’s debut book blends travel writing, philosophical treatise, self-deprecating comedy and political criticism; the author highlighting both our very human hypocrisy and genuine attempts to connect, and the singularity and the sameness of our youthful adventures as we attempt to individuate from our families and countries of origin.

Join us for the Melbourne book launch. Register here.

Date: Friday, 23 April from 6:00pm–8:00pm

Download a copy of the Media Release.

PHOTO 2021

Hoda Afshar

In her PHOTO 2021 commission, Agonistes, Tehran-born, Melbourne-based visual artist Hoda Afshar explores the experiences of people who have spoken out. Combining new and old photographic techniques, Afshar creates images that reflect the experiences of whistleblowers who have voiced harms and misconducts being perpetrated in Australian institutions today.

Acts of whistleblowing aimed at calling attention to alleged wrongdoing or misconduct continue to make headlines around the world. But despite the introduction of policies meant to protect them, the efforts of whistleblowers in Australia are increasingly being undermined by gag orders, policing, and other forms of control – by efforts to silence those who have spoken out, and to discourage anyone who might think to.

Whether whistleblowing on matters to do with immigration detention, youth detention, or aged and disability care, Afshar’s subjects have spoken out for those whose voices were never meant to be heard.

Hoda Ashfar’s Agonistes will be shown at two locations. Her film work will be premiered at Missing Persons. The accompanying photographic work can be viewed outside St Paul’s Cathedral, Swanston Street, Melbourne. See event details.

Listen to Hoda Afshar on Radio National. Find more at ABC News

Dates: 19 February to 7 March 2021.
Hours: Wednesday to Saturday 12:00–5:00pm

Image: Hoda Afshar, Agonistes (still) 2020, 1-channel digital video, colour, sound. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

The Little Theatre Presents

God’s Own Pawn Shop
A Reading in Two Parts


Missing Persons invites you to God’s Own Pawn Shop, a new performance by The Little Theatre that tells an imaginary and fragmented tale of possession, capitalism, domestic violence and the redemptive power of love. God’s Own Pawn Shop holds as many stories of hope and despair as it does redeemable goods.

The Little Theatre is the creation of Daylesford artist Jeff Stewart. With a varied career exhibiting drawings and paintings – as well as working as an artist in youth and adult detention and various community groups – for the past seven years Jeff’s interests in art, writing and performance have taken shape in the intimate shows of The Little Theatre. Scripted and performed by Jeff in front of audiences of less than 20 people, each show takes place inside a handcrafted portable booth known in the world of puppetry as a castelet. In this intimate setting, audiences closely encounter the vivid stories and the hand-painted set designs that house them.

God’s Own Pawn Shop features live narration by Jeff’s longtime collaborator Stuart Grant. Formerly a senior lecturer at the Centre For Theatre and Performance at Monash University, Stuart is also founding co-director of ecological site-specific performance group Environmental Performance Authority. He’s also a founding member of legendary Australian post-punk group Primitive Calculators, who formed in Melbourne in 1978 and are still active today.

As with The Little Theatre’s previous performance at Missing Persons (The Red Geranium and Its Almost Taste of Pepper, 2019), God’s Own Pawn Shop is a free public event. Seats are strictly limited – please make a reservation to attend one of the two evening performances through Eventbrite.

Date: Saturday 30 January, 5:45pm and 7:15pm. Attend on Facebook

Musée du Strip

materialiZm

In this exhibition Musée du Strip invites us to contemplate the philosophical theory of Materialism, a Western concept that describes the world as fundamentally relying on interconnecting matter. That is to say: anything from energy forces to dark matter, the cups we drink from to the seats we sit on, as well as our human consciousness, is perceived to be intrinsically linked by physical and invisible material qualities.

Laying the groundwork for this exhibition are seven emerging artists Hugo Blomley, Natalie Fenelon, Caeylen Fenelon-Norris, Ella Howells, Anna Jalanski, Gabrielle Skye Nehrybecki and Augusta Vinall Richardson. Their artworks can be defined by the very matter of which they come from, whether metal, plastic or paper (and the neurons required to create it).

Like previous exhibitions held inside Musée du Strip, this show materialiZm revolves around a ready-to-assemble walk-in greenhouse designed to provide your plants, fruit and vegetables with the optimum biological conditions in which to flourish all year round. Stripped of its heat and humidity-retaining features, the result is an unexpected platform to synthesise the experience of viewing art, people and the surrounds.

Musée du Strip has previously appeared in diverse locations including a public beachfront, a median strip, and inside contemporary art galleries and private homes. For this exhibition Musée du Strip is set within Missing Persons, a multi-arts space in the Nicholas Building, and on Wednesday 20 January shares the gallery space with Missing Persons’ life drawing class – a recurring mid-week feature of its public program.

With the participation of the life drawing group, art meets utility and new life is given to works created by the materialiZm artists, including furniture, art objects and sculptural assemblages. Drawings captured by the class participants will be contributed to the exhibition, creating a full material circle between art, matter and the people who experience them.

We would like to invite you to celebrate over drinks at the launch of the exhibition on Friday 22 January from 6:00–8:00pm.

The opening event will also be broadcast on Instagram Live. Join the party via Musée du Strip.

Dates:  21 to 24 January 2021. Attend on Facebook
Hours: Thursday to Saturday 12:00–6:00pm and Sunday 12:00–3:00pm

Download the media release