Sydney Fringe has launched An Anthology of Space 2015-2018, a 94-page report outlining prohibitive restrictions preventing Sydney’s creative sectors from activating empty industrial warehouse spaces and retail shop fronts.

An Anthology of Space proposes solutions to overcome the onerous red tape it says is strangling Sydney’s creative sectors.

The report calls for a variation to the National Construction Code – due to be updated in 2019 –  that would allow small arts venues to be treated for planning purposes in a similar way as restaurants.

Sydney Fringe Festival Director and Chief Executive, Kerri Glassock, says the most common problem for artists in NSW is the lack of affordable and appropriate space in which to make and present work year round.

Despite this need, the report points to prohibitive restrictions – regulatory and financial – hindering artists and creative industries from bringing new life to underutilised industrial and retail spaces through temporary artist projects.

The National Art School has announced that a record number of entries have been received for the revived Dobell Drawing Prize. 784 entries have been received from 650 artists from all over Australia, the highest number of entries to the Prize to date. Leading Australian artist Ben Quilty is the Judge for the 2019 Prize and the winner of this major Prize is to be announced on Thursday 28 March 2019 at the National Art School.

The Prize is a biennial competition by submission and will showcase the expanded field of drawing and an exhibition of work by 50 finalists will be presented at NAS Gallery from 28 March until 25 May 2019, alongside a new drawing symposium that explores the importance of drawing in all its diversity.

Sydney-based Indigenous artist Carmen Glynn-Braun has been awarded the 2018 TWT Excellence Prize, selected from more than 200 graduating students presenting work in the University of NSW Art & Design’s ANNUAL 18 Graduate Exhibition.

Glynn-Braun was awarded the $5,000 bursary by TWT Property in recognition of her work Untitled 2018 which explores the Indigenous women’s experiences with the Assimilation Policy, an Australian policy designed to obliterate Indigenous bloodlines entirely by removing children from their families and ultimately ‘breeding out’ skin colour over generations.

Glynn-Braun’s work considers how countless Indigenous women lost their children under the act and consists of four flesh-coloured paint skins that imitate the various skin colours of Indigenous Australia today, post-Stolen Generations. The paint skins are hung alongside each other, fairest to darkest in solidarity, standing as evidence of the continued survival and resilience of Aboriginal people.

Established in 2017, the annual TWT Excellence Prize is awarded to the top graduating artist presenting work in the ANNUAL 18, Australia’s largest and most diverse national showcase of graduate contemporary art, design and creative media. The exhibition is free to the public and open until 8 December 2018.

Image: Carmen Glynn-Braun with her work Untitled 2018. Courtesy TWT.

The 2018 National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Architecture Commission by Melbourne architecture practice MUIR and landscape architecture studio OPENWORK was unveiled at the NGV International. Entitled Doubleground, the winning proposal for the fourth annual competition is a collaboration between the two practices, inspired by key architectural elements of Sir Roy Grounds’s iconic NGV International building in the year of the building’s fiftieth anniversary.

Doubleground transforms the NGV’s Grollo Equiset Garden with a site-specific work of temporary architecture by literally raising sections of the landscape and creating chasm-like passageways for visitors to explore between the tilted embankments.  Architect Amy Muir and landscape architect Mark Jacques drew from memories of visiting the NGV as a young child to create a digital collage that uses architectural components from NGV International for the design blueprint.

Including a canyon-like corridor, which references the triangular patterns of the NGV’s façade and glass wall of the Great Hall, the installation features a decking area that recalls Grounds’s timber design for the Gallery foyer and a bamboo garden inspired by the building’s original Bamboo Court courtyard.

Carriageworks has unveiled its most ambitious visual arts project, a major exhibition by acclaimed American artist Nick Cave, presented free to the public from 23 November 2018 until 3 March 2019. NICK CAVE: UNTIL marks Carriageworks’ most substantial presentation of work by a solo artist and Nick Cave’s largest exhibition to date.

NICK CAVE: UNTIL is the result of a partnership between Carriageworks, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, with the three organisations co-commissioning and co-presenting the project following four years development with the artist. In Australia the exhibition will be seen exclusively at Carriageworks.

A play on the phrase ‘innocent until proven guilty’, or in this case ‘guilty until proven innocent’, UNTIL began with a question Cave asked himself: ‘Is there racism in heaven?’ Rather than providing a direct answer, Cave offers us an experience, an immersive exhibition that addresses issues of race relations, gender politics and gun violence in America, and the resonance of these matters in communities around the world.

Image: Nick Cave, UNTIL, Carriageworks, Image Zan Wimberley.

The second annual TWT Excellence Prize has increased to a $5000 bursary awarded to the top graduating artist presenting work in the University of NSW Art & Design’s ANNUAL 18 Graduate Exhibition, Australia’s largest and most diverse national showcase of graduate contemporary art, design and creative media.

The winner will be announced on Tuesday 27 November at an advance preview of the A&D ANNUAL 18, ahead of the public opening of the exhibition that features work by 200 graduating students across seven venues at UNSW Art & Design.

The 2018 judging panel also includes UNSW Deputy Head of School (Design) Dr Mark Ian Jones; UNSW Senior Fine Arts Lecturer Debra Phillips; and Art Initiatives Manager at TWT and Bridging Hope Charity Foundation, Ariel Zhang.

Inaugural TWT Excellence Prize winner, Jessica Long, won the prize in 2017 for her video work titled Apartment Block No. 10, a four-minute video work that paid homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and featured 10 sequences of apartment night-life.

Carriageworks and Ensemble Offspring present Lone Hemispheres, a one-night-only program of seminal works by revolutionary architect, mathematician and composer Iannis Xenakis, alongside newly commissioned solo compositions by Berlin-based Australian Cathy Milliken, and Sydney composers Elizabeth Younan and Michael Smetanin. The works will be performed on Tuesday 4 December by Véronique Serret (violin), Claire Edwardes (percussion) and Zubin Kanga (piano).

Ensemble Offspring founding member Claire Edwardes said, “The music of Iannis Xenakis is unashamedly bold, and Ensemble Offspring is also unashamedly bold. To champion Xenakis, we have programmed three new works written to complement three classics by Xenakis for piano, violin and percussion. Lone Hemispheres is a celebration of a 20th-century genius and master alongside the newest of the new sound worlds – all the while featuring Ensemble Offspring core members as virtuosic soloists. Xenakis composed hard-hitting music that is ecstatic and cathartic in its power and often deeply expressive. The performers of Xenakis’s music must be almost supernatural in their skills and a live performance allows listeners to witness a seismic musical event. It is summed up most succinctly by UK music writer and critic Tom Service who describes Xenakis’s work as – ‘a musical happening of cosmic intensity’.”

Image: Who Dreamed it, Ensemble Offspring 2017 at Carriageworks.

Image- MUFFY, OneJessa

Sydney, Australia: Caldera, a boutique multi-sensory art experience featuring burlesque performances, experimental music and art from the underground has announced a program of visual artists to create site-responsive installations. Eleven cross-disciplinary and interactive artists will utilise the 130-year-old industrial metalwork shop of Eveleigh Works to stage a series of artworks responding to Caldera’s provocative themes. Audiences will be given a code to a digital map as they enter Eveleigh Locomotive Workshop and are encouraged to explore the industrial space, with eight sessions offered over four-nights, from 29 November – 2 December 2018.

Artistic Director Laurence Rosier Staines describes, “Caldera is a night of fire and art in an industrial cathedral. The artworks we’ve selected will feature metal, optical illusion, digital necromancy, hair, line painting, fire, steam and ephemera. They all work towards a larger theme, which may become apparent as guests follow the digital map and uncover them, hidden among the steam hammers and blast furnaces.”

The artists chosen to feature work at Caldera include: Anji Brice, OneJessa, Cyma Hibri, Harry Hock, Ben Lang, Brooke Ellen Louttit, Duncan Maclean, Alireza Mirzaeisabet, Emily Parsons-Lord, Gwen Taualai and Meng-Yu Yan