Next Wave Festival 2010 (13-30 May) proposed that for art there was No risk too great. In Artistic Director Jeff Khan’s second and final festival, more than 300 young artists from Australia and Asia responded to diverse conceptions of risk, from the global, to the local, to the deeply personal. There was a strong emphasis in 2010 upon festival-curated projects such as Structural Integrity, a world’s fair conglomeration of ARIs from the Asia-Pacific region, or the epic Sports Club Project that through the proportion of venue, the MCG and the George Knott Athletics Reserve, questioned the nature of artistic practice in terms spectacle and athleticism.

Giving momentum to the festival as a whole was an enormous program of over 40 artist-led works, developed both independently and with the assistance of Next Wave through the Kickstart program, that sometimes directly (e.g. Ashley Dyer’s And Then Something Fell On My Head) and sometimes obliquely (e.g. Michaela Gleave and Kate Mitchell’s Wall Work) addressed risk through art. Other works from Next Wave Festival 2010 included Bennett Miller’s Dachshund UN, a parliament of 47 live Dachshunds examining international risk-management and Tristan Meecham’s Fun Run, a joyful and sweaty participatory satire that celebrated the excess of marathon, David Blaine style. As hinted in the tattoo-like typography, for NWF10 there was no risk too great in the pursuit arresting intrigue.

View Next Wave Festival 2010 Website
View Next Wave Festival Text Camp Website