Next Wave Festival

“Best arts festival this side of the Greenwich meridian.”
ThreeThousand.com.au

The Next Wave Festival is our largest, most ambitious and most popular project.

Run every second year since 1985, the Next Wave Festival is one of Australia’s major festivals for new contemporary art, and is regarded as the most important and critically-rigorous festival showcasing work by artists in their twenties. The next Festival will be in May 2012.

The Next Wave Festival is a curated festival, managed by an artistic director. Next Wave selects artists through various national-wide call-outs. Next Wave directly assists artists in the creation and presentation of their new work. It is a Festival that features art form areas including visual arts, performance, dance, new media, literature, hybrid projects and beyond, pushing the boundaries of traditional media and encouraging connections between diverse art forms and disciplines. Next Wave encourages artists to undertake ambitious new projects, to experiment and engage with new ideas, and develop new skills and networks. Next Wave is also dedicated to exploring different contexts for contemporary arts practice, activating unconventional spaces for exchange between artists and audiences.

READ about all of our Next Wave Festivals dating back to 1985.

2012 Next Wave Festival

The next Next Wave Festival will happen from the 19th to the 27th of May 2012. It’s theme is The space between us wants to sing and will be Emily Sexton’s first Festival as Artistic Director.

Next Wave has already begun selecting artists and planning for the event, but to keep up-to-date about Festival news and announcements as they happen sign up to the Pegboard at the bottom of this page.

IMAGE: 2010 Next Wave Festival opening night and launch of Structural Integrity. Photo by Shea Bresnehan.

Kickstart

Kickstart is Next Wave’s major developmental activity, assisting young artists across artforms to develop new work in a supportive environment. Taking place in the non-festival year, Kickstart projects are developed with a view towards inclusion in the forthcoming Next Wave Festival and respond to that Festival’s theme.

Kickstart participants undertake a program of workshops covering all aspects of project development including creative development, budgeting and marketing as well as receiving ongoing administrative support and professional advice from the Next Wave staff during the Kickstart period. Kickstart programs culminate in developmental showings of the work-in-progress to peers, stakeholders and other Kickstart participants.

READ about Next Wave Kickstart 2011 here.

Kickstart 2011 Participants

The following sixteen Kickstart 2011 participants and groups will develop new work for the 2012 Next Wave Festival:

Abdul Abdullah, Nathan Beard and Casey Ayres (WA)
Alice Williams (NSW)
Alison Currie and Kel Mocilnik (SA)
Atlanta Eke (VIC)
Ben Kolaitis and Alex Cuffe (VIC/QLD)
Elizabeth Dunn (VIC)
Genevieve Trace and Daniel Santangeli (QLD)
Danielle Clej and Ruth McConchie (QLD)
Liesel Zink (QLD)
Bridget Balodis, Mark Pritchard and Zoe Rouse (VIC).
Michele Lee and Helen Huynh (VIC).
Natalie Abbott (VIC)
Mutation Theatre (VIC)
Pip Wallis and Jessica O’Brian (VIC).
Rennie McDougall (VIC)
Robin Hungerford (NSW)
Team MESS (NSW)

READ short bios about these artists.

LISTEN to Ulanda Blair, Next Wave’s Artistic Program Manager, talk about Kickstart 2011 in this in Australian Business Arts Foundation podcast.

Melbourne Metro YHA is a supporter of Kickstart 2011 and is Next Wave’s preferred accommodation supporter.

Past Projects

Time Lapse 2009 – 2010

Next Wave Time Lapse was a year-long festival of screen-based art called Next Wave Time Lapse, screened at Federation Square over 2009 and 2010.

Next Wave Time Lapse was an arresting program of new screen-based art work by young emerging artists from around Australia, on Federation Square’s Big Screen and surrounding multimedia sites. Every month up until May 2010, a new work by one of twelve of Australia’s most exciting video and new media artists screened at Fed Square. In May 2010 the program concluded with a screening of all of the works in the 2010 Next Wave Festival in a project called The Ultimate Time Lapse Mega Mix.

Sweet Work

Next Wave presented its popular free artist workshop program Sweet Work in Mildura and Bendigo in 2008 and 2009.

Sweet Work was Next Wave’s free series of workshops for young artists designed to promote new ideas, collaborations and projects. The Mildura part of the project happened as part of the 2009 Mildura Wentworth Arts Festival in March 2009, with the SWEET WORK Bendigo held in August 2008.

A selection of Next Wave artists lead a series of unique collaborative workshop programs designed to assist local artists to create new artwork through innovative collaborations across art forms. The free workshops, for artists aged 30 and under, give participants the opportunity to work together with the goal of producing new hybrid work.

Come on the Scene

In 2009 Next Wave and NETS Victoria presented Come on the Scene, an exhibition which showcased dazzling new works by five young regional artists from Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.

Featuring multimedia, sculpture, printmaking, performance, textile and installation works, Come on the Scene examined relationships, identity, communication, mythology and popular culture. These dynamic works provided a fresh perspective on regional Australia and the role of art in fostering a new sense of community and connectedness.

Arising from Next Wave’s inaugural regional program in 2008, each artist represented in Come on the Scene developed an ambitious, large-scale new project, which was included in the 2008 Next Wave Festival.

With the support of NETS Victoria, the artists redeveloped their work into a touring exhibition that took the works back into regional Australia, to the communities and towns from which they originated.

Next Wave, NETS Victoria and Warrnambool Art Gallery staff install the first leg of the Come on the Scene regional tour, Friday 13 February 2009:

Come on the Scene – Warrnambool from Next Wave on Vimeo.

Artists:
Ellen Coyle (VIC)
Trevor Flinn (VIC)
Carly Preston (VIC)
Roderick Sprigg (WA)
Pip Stafford (TAS)

Venues and Dates:
Warrnambool 14 Feb – 29 March 2009
Shepparton 11 April – 31 May 2009
Swan Hill 12 June – 19 July 2009
Morwell 1 Aug – 11 Oct 2009
Horsham 27 Oct – 28 November 2009

Visit the Come on the Scene website.

Free Play

Free Play, the Next Wave Independent Game Developers’ Conference, was an initiative originally started by Next Wave in 2006 that has now grown into an independent event in its own right.

THe last Next Wave Free Play event was held on Saturday the 18th of August 2007 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. More than 300 people came along and hear alsmot 30 speakers present a series of lectures and workshops. This hugely popular conference catered for independent and DIY game developers, game modders and mappers, creatively frustrated professionals, game development students and digital artists from every state in Australia.

International Keynote, Jonathan Blow, presenting at Free Play 2007.

Free Play’s aim was to bring together these communities in a forum that is financially reasonable, with a program developed by the communities themselves.

Free Play was also dedicated to Australia’s vibrant community of young people, from game modders to character skinners, who don’t have the desire or the resources to create a stand–alone game by themselves, but who instead find a platform for their art and ideas through game modification.

Free Play continues on, with new organisers who are carrying and developing the original Next Wave ethos and aims of the project.

Visit the new Free Play website HERE and find out about the next Free Play conference

Archives

Click HERE to read about every Festival and project we’ve presented since we began in 1985.