2010 Next Wave Festival, this May

The Next Wave Festival is on this year

2010 Next Wave Festival
NO RISK TOO GREAT
13 – 30 May 2010

Visit the 2010 Next Wave Festival teaser site.

Can art be challenging and meaningful in a risk-averse, overly cautious society obsessed with security, OH&S policies and micro-management of behaviour?

2010 Next Wave Festival from Next Wave on Vimeo.

This question and many more form the foundation of the 2010 Next Wave Festival of emerging artists in Melbourne, 13-30 May.

EXPECT: Subversive gender and defiant sexuality. Apocalyptic fantasies. Busby Berkeley murders. One-on-one encounters. Protest and activism. Local hazards and monotonous labour. The raw, the messy and the unfinished. Science, religion, truth and death…

Australia’s leading curated festival for emerging artists, Next Wave focuses on new art, new artists and new possibilities. The Festival presents the future of art, today.

The Festival’s theme, No Risk Too Great, was a challenge to the artists to be ambitious and see what art can achieve while asking the question: is our society and our art too safe? Next Wave opens up new spaces for artists to explore this question.

Building on the momentum of previous Festivals, this year brings together around 53 projects and over 300 artists from Victoria, Australia and across Asia.

The artists have responded to the theme with great relish, conceiving ambitious projects of a scale not seen before at the Festival.

New places will be opened up for Festival projects: from the streets of Melbourne’s CBD to windowsills high above the crowds, from community sporting fields to the MCG. These site-specific works engage with these spaces in new ways and incorporate their audiences into the work. This year also sees the Festival’s largest engagement with Asia, offering the only comprehensive engagement for young Australian artists with their emerging Asian counterparts.

The full Festival program will be launched April 13.

For further information please contact Festival Publicist Leith Thomas at leith@nextwave.org.au or on +61 411 055 299.

Download the latest media release.

Download the new 2010 Next Wave Festival poster.

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NO RISK TOO GREAT

Next Wave Festival themes throw up a challenge to artists and audiences alike. Here, Next Wave’s Artistic Director Jeff Khan presents the background that underpins the new theme:

“The 2010 Next Wave Festival will explore the role of risk in a risk-averse culture. Under pressure to conform, we have all become experts in micro-managing our own behaviour. But is this self-surveillance distracting us from the bigger risks, the more un-manageable ones which are increasingly – and radically – changing our world? Just what does “risk” actually mean in these volatile times?

“In a wider culture of risk management, how prepared are we to make decisions that are brave, courageous or transgressive? Where is the line between our own personal, moral and ethical worlds, and the codes and principles which circulate in the broader context of contemporary culture? What is our capacity to draw, hold or cross this line? What are the real risks of our time, what are the risks worth taking, and what is our role as individuals, and as artists, in relation to them? How can we act boldly and imaginatively, in art and in life?“

Downloads

The 2010 Next Wave Festival Theme Manifesto.
The Theme Announcement Media Release.

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Image: Tape Projects, 2010 Next Wave Festival artists. Photo by Tim Herbert, timothy.herbert@gmail.com.