Free music machines, science and blood, forays into undiscovered areas and curatorial projects in fashion houses: this is just a small snapshot of what’s on offer at Melbourne’s Nite Art. Featuring more than 60 artists across 25 galleries and museums, the one-night-only event aims to forge new contexts, relationships and experiences for artists and audiences.
Taking place on 27 July, Nite Art is ultimately a celebration of Melbourne’s arts community. “Collaborations and relationships are at the heart of Nite Art,” explains co-founder Deborah Stahle. “The night enables people to discover new spaces and make very real and direct connections with artists and curators.”
Among the many events on offer, Nite Art is playing host to Berlin-based artist Fabian Knecht, who will be presenting a lecture-performance on his works SPLIT (SPALTUNG) and ISOLATION. Created during Knecht’s recent visit to Australia, SPLIT (SPALTUNG) looks at land interventions in a remote conversation reserve, while ISOLATION considers the impact of bringing the gallery space into the wider world.
Another Nite Art highlight is curator Nikki Lam’s moving image curatorial project, Frames of Seeing, which will be housed in fashion house Alpha 60. Meanwhile US artist Jordan Eagles will host his blood projection Illuminations. Arts Centre Melbourne will be screening looped highlights from The Other Film Festival. And galleries including West Space, BLINDSIDE, Linden New Art, CAVES and Flinders Lane Gallery will open their doors for the evening.
Alongside these events, Nite Art also branches out to Melbourne’s academic community. “We’ve been working with the museums and collections at the University of Melbourne by engaging curators and artists to develop a contemporary response to the various collections,” says Stahle. For example, the Grainger Museum will be hosting music and sound performances which explore the legacy of Percy Grainger, while the newly established Science Gallery will investigate both the literal and symbolic nature of blood.
With such a wide variety of events on offer, Nite Art doesn’t indulge any particular curatorial premise. Instead the night looks towards the energy of Melbourne’s art community. As Stahle points out, “It’s a creative snapshot of the creative ecology within the city at this point in time and of course that’s constantly changing, so it doesn’t need the imposition of a curatorial focus as artistic life is constantly evolving.”
Nite Art
Various locations across Melbourne CBD and the University of Melbourne
Thursday 27 July
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
For Lardil and Yangkaal writer and curator Maya Hodge, Archie Moore’s presentation at this year’s Venice Biennale is a powerful symbol of reckoning—one that asks the world to bear witness to the long shadows of colonial violence and clears space for possibilities ahead.
Melbourne-born figurative artist and ceramicist Rob McHaffie takes a global view of human idiosyncrasy. His biggest exhibition to date, now showing at Bendigo Art Gallery, covers over a decade of his painting practice.
Curated by Lee Kinsella, Stuffed, Bolstered and Upholstered—on now at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery—looks at how woven and fibre objects align with the human form, encompassing the practices of over thirty artists working across textiles, painting, ceramics, sculpture and installation.
