Next Wave is delighted to announce Nicholas Currie (Mununjali, Kuku Yalanji) will develop and present a new multidisciplinary work, Rodney Currie Stars in a Movie, 2026, as the inaugural artist for Soft Infrastructures – Next Wave’s major commissioning series dedicated to social practice and community-led methodologies, supporting an early-career artist to create a career-defining work that reflects the evolving role of art in public life

Combining moving image, archival materials and performance, Rodney Currie Stars in a Movie 2026, reclaims the camera and screen as tools of Indigenous authorship. Working with his father Rodney Currie, a First Nations artist and community leader and former cinema projectionist, Nicholas Currie will create a series of portraits, conversations, and staged moments that reflect family life, and Australian and cinema history, while positioning himself as narrator and inheritor of these stories.

Nicholas Currie is an emerging artist working across painting, sculpture, moving image and performance. His practice is grounded in autobiographical inquiry and explores identity, masculinity, memory and Indigenous self-representation within contemporary Australia. Currie’s work moves between humour and criticality as undercurrents to the major themes addressed in his works: contemporary Indigenous perspectives, hauntology and exploration of identity. This project marks a transition for Currie into a participatory practice unfolding through collaborative research and workshops prioritising care, consent and reciprocity.

Nicholas Currie will collaborate closely with artist Camille Perry across the material and conceptual development of the film. Drawing on her specialist expertise in analogue photographic processes and film development, Perry will contribute to the testing and execution of 16mm techniques, including hand-drawn interventions, material manipulation, and critical engagement with the ethics of image-making. Together they will explore film as both medium and subject, interrogating its archival, ecological and political dimensions while shaping a cohesive visual language for the work.

This commission comes at a critical point in Nicholas Currie’s career. Following significant gallery exhibitions such as West Space and Black Dot Gallery and increasing institutional recognition, this project enables him to amplify his practice into an ambitious hybrid form that integrates social practice, moving image and live performance at scale.

Soft Infrastructures invites artists to reimagine collective, place-based and relational ways of art making for the future. It provides one early-career artist each year with the resources, mentorship and institutional backing necessary to develop an ambitious new work that meaningfully engages public life and civic space.

Focusing on deep collaboration with local communities, this program creates space for connection, learning, and belonging. It invites participation from artists and non-artists alike, and embraces collaboration with humans and more-than-human kin.