Next Wave’s inaugural Winter Windows series will feature local artists Axel Garay and Liwen Lian—whose works will light up Brunswick Mechanics Institute over the longest nights of the year.

Through an open call out, we invited artists who live, work or study in Merri-bek to propose video works responding to the theme Possible Worlds: Imagined Futures. We are delighted to announce participating artists for the 2025 WInter Windows series are Axel Garay and Liwen Lian.

Axel Garay (Meriam/Puerto Rican/Malaysian) is an emerging queer First Nations interdisciplinary artist and storyteller working with the still and moving image. He put forward his work Sik, which grapples with a future filled with colourful plastics and wrappers from our food and product consumption. The themes in this work remind us that we have a unified future and invite the Merri-Bek community to explore it together.

Liwen Lian is a Hui-Chinese 回族 visual artist, designer, and community arts labourer. Their put forward an ongoing work, Nightfall—a story of their alter ego Salima who ‘traverses the liminal space between worlds—human and machine, seen and unseen, the tangible and the dreamed’. With styling in collaboration with Merri-Bek based fashion designer Wilson Jedd Adams, the work draws from Islamic mysticism, Christian allegory, and Chinese cosmology, to question the boundaries of reality in an age where digital illusions blur truth.

We received more than twenty applications and would like to thank everyone for their incredible proposals. The selection panel was made up of local award-winning curator, writer and art historian Nur Shkembi, former Next Wave Young Artistic Director MaggZ, alongside Next Wave’s Lead Program Producer Frances Robinson and CEO Elyse Goldfinch.

Elyse said, “We’re thrilled to be supporting Axel Garay and Liwen Lian—two visionary artists whose practices push boundaries and invite bold conversations. Axel’s Sik offers a powerful reflection on consumption and future ecologies through a First Nations lens, while Liwen’s Nightfall immerses us in a poetic, otherworldly journey that blurs the lines between the real and the imagined. Their work challenges, inspires, and expands the ways we see and engage with the world around us.”

Axel and Liwen’s works will illuminate our corner of Bulleke-bek (Brunswick) from dawn until dusk from Friday 4 July to Monday 18 August.