Cultural empowerment, artificial intelligence, the music biz, the ethics of criticism and the quest for perfection: these are just a few of the topics being explored by Vivid Ideas 2017.
With over 200 events from 400 speakers, the festival features a wide dialogue across art, design, music, film and social change, as well as insights into creative practices and careers. As a core component of Vivid Sydney, the ideas festival consists of public talks, professional development opportunities and panel discussions.
The artist is set to discuss his do-it-yourself approach and his signature blend between art, design and street culture.
Vivid Ideas is also marked by an interest in social and political issues and includes the visual art exhibition Cause and Effect, which explores the consequences of war, racism and environmental issues within Australian society. Other events take a more targeted approach towards arts practitioners, such as the Creatives Get Cooperative workshop, which thinks through the challenges and social opportunities of the sharing economy.
Of course the festival isn’t simply concerned with voicing interesting ideas, but exploring how innovative thoughts can be practically realised. Consequently Vivid Ideas entails a range of workshops exploring the alternative market of freelance work, start-up culture, the ethics of cultural criticism and professional insights into the film and arts industry. Also scheduled are frank discussions on the inevitable links between money and art-making and how young people can begin to establish their art career.
Vivid Ideas 2017
Various venues across Sydney
27 May – 17 June
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.
Melbourne Art Fair has announced its 2025 line up, with 60 galleries and Indigenous art centres slated to feature alongside some major international commissions and public programs.
Past meets present in Leyla Steven’s latest exhibition, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-curated by Artspace. The Australian-Balinese artists adopts a collaborative approach to restitution, scrutinising the systems of conservation and documentation we have inherited.
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.
