A Dynamic Platform

A Dynamic Platform

Staged within an energetic cultural city, Sydney Contemporary returns for its fourth edition, showcasing artwork from six continents. Taking place at Carriageworks – a dynamic multidisciplinary arts district – the event celebrates cutting edge pieces from global galleries whilst offering a platform to emerging talent from Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia. Looking to the future of innovative practice, 2018’s programme offers dedicated exhibitions of contemporary video, installation and performance.

Featured international galleries – which debut in 2018 – include Flowers Gallery, London and New York and Pace Gallery, which has bases in New York, Hong Kong, London, Beijing, Seoul, Palo Alto and Geneva. Returning institutions include Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, OLSEN and Sullivan+Strumpf; Melbourne’s Tolarno Galleries and ARC ONE Gallery; Auckland’s Gow Langsford Gallery and STARKWHITE; Sundaram Tagore Gallery of Hong Kong, New York and Singapore; and Singapore’s Yavuz Gallery.

ARC ONE Gallery showcases work by artist due Honey Long and Prue Stent, featured here. Occupying the borderlines between photography, performance, installation and sculpture, their dreamlike work investigates notions of gender and the body, offering surreal compositions that fragment the human form. Colourful materials cover intertwined figures, crafting uncanny and surprising images that evoke feelings of both freedom and anonymity.

Ranging from the handcrafted to the digital, the fair’s Installation Contemporary strand foregrounds innovative and site specific pieces. Highlights include Jean Dubuffet’s (1901-1985) four metre high L’Incivil (1973/2014) and Simon Ingram’s (b. 1971) recent Radio Painting Station in ZKM’s Open Codes – Living in Digital Worlds (2017-18), which incorporates an EEG headset into the gallery space. Yhonnie Scarce’s (b. 1973) work investigates the British Atomic testing carried out in the Maralinga area during the 1950s and 1960s, tracking the effects of radiation on the local indigenous population.

As Curator Nina Miall notes, the show: “gives artists the opportunity to look beyond the spatial limitations and commercial considerations of the fair booth,to play with scale, work in more experimental or ambitious ways, or makes work that responds directly to the industrial spaces.”

From 13-16 September. Find out more here. 

Credits:
1. Honey Long and Prue Stent, Fluc-tation, 2015. Courtesy ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne.
2. Honey Long and Prue Stent, Amoeba II, 2015. Courtesy ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne.
3. Honey Long and Prue Stent, Drapes, 2015. Courtesy ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne.