Sydney Contemporary, Australasia’s premier art fair has today announced AMPLIFY – the newly named and highly anticipated Installation Contemporary program.

Designed to exhibit large-scale artworks in a diverse range of media, including moving-image, or more ambitious and conceptually driven projects that extend beyond the traditional booth presentation, AMPLIFY presents an opportunity to view innovative, site-specific, and interactive installations in the environment of Carriageworks.

Curated by Annika Kristensen, Visual Arts Curator at Perth Festival, and Associate Curator at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA),  participating artists include Angela Tiatia who will present Narcissus, a contemporary reimagining of the classical Greek myth, exploring contemporary visual culture’s worship of the self, pictured.

Anna Schwartz Gallery has unveiled Chiharu Shiota: State of Being, an exhibition of new works by the acclaimed Japanese artist presented until 30 July 2022. State of Being is being exhibited concurrently with Shiota’s The Soul Trembles – curated by Mami Kataoka, Director of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo – at QAGOMA. A significant moment in Shiota’s twenty-five-year artistic practice, each of these Australian exhibitions are new touch points in Shiota’s devotion to exploring the tangle of memory and dreams and their transcendence into our waking lives.

State of Being is comprised of work in both two and three dimensions, all realised through the artist’s signature language of threads. A a sculptural human figure in red rests beneath yet connected to an immense web that spans the gallery from wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. On a more intimate scale, sculptures and works on canvas and paper offer an opportunity to see details of Shiota’s thinking. Reclaimed love letters, diaries and photographs, found by the artist in flea markets, are artefacts of other lives lived in other places.

Heide Museum of Modern Art presents Bruce Munro: From Sunrise Road, the first museum exhibition in Australia of the work of internationally celebrated English/Australian artist Bruce Munro, best known for his interactive, large-scale light installations inspired largely by his interest in shared human experience. Presented from 25 June to 16 October, the exhibition combines spectacular indoor and outdoor experiential artworks with intimate story-pieces, revealing the depth of the artist’s practice and the breadth of his sources, from the personal and philosophical to the literary and spiritual.

Australia’s largest contemporary multi-arts precinct presents a major solo exhibition by acclaimed Australian artist Mel O’Callaghan titled All is Life, which expands on the artist’s continued exploration of the relationship between life and nonlife. Presented free to the public from 23 June to 21 August 2022, the exhibition, which has been curated by Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley, includes an ambitious sculptural installation activated by performances, a new sound work, and a two-channel film capturing the sacred ritual Dhalo, shot by the artist on a recent trip to Ambaulim, Goa in India.

Sydney Contemporary, in partnership with MA Financial Group, has announced their highly anticipated Performance Contemporary and Kid Contemporary programs. The sixth edition of Australasia’s premier art fair and one of the most significant and celebrated art events on the cultural calendar, Sydney Contemporary, will present over 90 leading Australian and New Zealand galleries exhibiting the work of over 450 artists hailing from 35 countries, from 8-11 September 2022 at Carriageworks.

Performance Contemporary, curated by Jeff Khan (Artistic Director) and Samantha Watson-Wood (Artistic Advisor) of Performance Space, presents work by Salote Tawale, WeiZen Ho, Rakini Devi and Alli Sebastian Wolf, four artists reflecting the incredible diversity of practices, artforms and ideas that make up the contemporary performance environment today. Working across video, installation and performance and exploring themes spanning ritual, celebration, environment, and identity, the 2022 Performance Contemporary program artists share a bold use of movement, colour, gesture, and interdisciplinary forms.

Kid Contemporary will occupy a dedicated space at the Fair, with children of all ages are invited to create an artwork inspired by Venezuelan/Australian artist Nadia Hernández’s practice. In “It’s time for sancocho!” children can create their own art mobiles from handcrafted paper cut-outs and stencils.

Image: Alli Sebastian Wolf, ‘Frill Neck Lizard’, performance

Bundanon’s Season 2 program: Parallel Landscapes presents four distinct artistic approaches to the Shoalhaven environment and wider Australian bush. The Season 2 program will be presented to the public from 2 July – 6 November 2022 at the recently opened Bundanon Art Museum.

Encompassing three exhibitions the program explores different ways to view the natural world, ranging from the historical to the contemporary. The exhibitions are Arthur Boyd: Landscape of the Soul; The Hidden by Tim Georgeson and William Barton; and The River and the Sea by Reuben Ernest Brown (Uncle Ben Brown). The exhibitions reflect Bundanon’s central vision, as established by the Boyd family when gifting the property to the public in 1993 – to foster an appreciation for and understanding of landscape and art.

Sydney Fringe Festival, New South Wales’ largest independent arts festival, has announced its largest and longest program to date. Presented from 16 August – 30 September 2022, the Festival will start two weeks earlier than usual to accommodate over 500 events following an unprecedented response to this year’s registration campaign. After two years of cancellations, Sydney Fringe is set to once again highlight the city’s vibrant culture with a diverse program spanning theatre, music, comedy, visual art, film, musical theatre, dance, circus, literature and poetry.