 There are queer
highlights aplenty in the Next Wave Festival, reports Richard Watts.
“I definitely think that there’s a strong contingent of
queer artists and queer content in this festival,” says the 29-year-old
Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival, Jeff Khan (pictured).
“More than anything, I think that flows on from the festival
theme of ‘Closer Together’; this idea of the kind of closeness that is sanctioned,
and the kind of closeness that is marginalised and repressed in contemporary
culture. I think that queer issues and broader issues of sexuality are really
important to that theme.”
Established in 1984, Next Wave is a biennial festival promoting
and celebrating the work of young artists, primarily those under 25 years of
age. Over the years since its inception, however, it’s evolved from being a
youth arts festival focused on young people as an audience, to being firmly
focussed on the art side of the equation.
“As well as being a youth arts festival, we’re a curated
festival [which] means we can focus on the best and most interesting work by
young artists,” Khan explains. “It’s looking at young, emerging practitioners
as the pioneers of new ideas and new artforms. We’re a laboratory for testing
the possibilities of collaboration across disciplines, and new ways for artists
and audiences to connect.”
While local artists are strongly represented in Khan’s first
Next Wave, he also had the opportunity to travel on a scouting mission overseas
while assembling his inaugural programme. The exhibition Unsheltered Workshops, which opened on Tuesday night at the VCA Margaret
Lawrence Gallery in Southbank, grew out of that tour.
“I was looking for artists who stretch their practises to
encompass social situations and the general public; and whose practises were a
little more unwieldy than your conventional studio artists might be,” he says.
“One of our Unsheltered
Artists is a queer artist from New
York, Lynne Chan, whose group, Lesbians and Unicorns
Resisting Every Limit (LAUREL) is holding a telethon to recruit members in the
middle of the festival, Saturday May 24.
“We’ve also got a number of queer artists performing across
both of our nightclub projects at Billboard and The Men’s Gallery, including
girl-boy band 4 Eva More. There’s a whole host of really exciting queer content
and queer artists who are really using those issues of sexuality and gender to
push the boundaries of their medium,” Khan enthuses.
When it comes to pushing boundaries, the Next Wave event
that takes that concept to the extreme is one which seeks to project a new
artwork out into space.
“Yes, indeed; three light years out into space, as streamed
by Florida’s
Deep Space Communications Network. Willoh S Weiland’s Yelling at Stars project is Australia’s first-ever
inter-stellar message. Thus far, Earth’s representation of itself has been
pretty crap; from the hopes and dreams of 1100 Russian teenagers to a year’s
worth of classified job advertisements; to more official messages, where we
represent ourselves as problem-solving geniuses who are so bland we make Doogie
Howser look like a party animal.
“Willoh’s aiming to redress that from an Australian
perspective, and also paint a more honest view of humanity, which will be
broadcast into space on the final day of the festival,” Khan concludes.
Next Wave Festival,
May 15 – 31. Photo: Paul Davis
www.nextwave.org.au
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