Running since 2001, Kickstart is one of the ways we work with early-career experimental artists and support them to realise their ideas.
Under the festival model, Kickstart inspired artists to create their most ambitious work to date, presented at Next Wave Festival in Melbourne.
Today, it looks a little different.
Co-curated with the Artistic Directorate, early-career experimental artists from across the continent take part in an 18-month development program.
Centring artists where they live and work, we are shifting our structures to foster slow development, blend intergenerational support and mentorship, and see artists experiment from the vantage point of their existing location, contexts, and communities.
Learn more about how the Kickstart program works in 2024–25.
More than ever, we recognise the strength in nurturing long-form relationships between artists and the emphasis on giving them the time and space needed to experiment, play, fail, test and try again – in order to make that ‘ambitious new work’.
– Next Wave Lead Program Producer Frances Robinson.
When Next Wave took on a new strategic direction, we reconsidered and reinvented how this legacy commissioning and artist development program could allow us to privilege artists from all over the country.
We are testing what it looks like to curate in a values-based way, without EOIs and callouts that often bring with them elements of labour, gatekeeping, literacy barriers, and hierarchy – Curation as Care.
Led by our values of Justice, Friendship and Care, our national Artistic Directorate bring an intersectional and thoughtful eye to this program, ensuring that equity and justice are practised in their selection process.
Kickstart aims to support early-career artists, especially those who are on a tipping point in their career and whose practice is embedded in, driven or shaped by community, experimentation and non-conventional knowledge.
Our inaugural Artistic Directorate and their Kickstart artists wrapped up with Next Wave in 2023.
See the 2021 Cohort →
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‘Burial’ by Amias Hanley, photo by Renee Stamatis, 2023
‘Anvár’ by Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson, 2023
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‘Fiddle, Twiddle & Tune’ by Prue Stevenson, photo by Pia Jonson, 2023