Our past consumes our future, rolling around the oceans, choked in our garbage. Our footsteps form and decay, and yet our trash remains, in great plastic detail for centuries after us. Sik [pronounced seek] is a two channel video portrait series grappling with a future land filled with our trashy remains.
How do our descendants weave our garbage into the folklore of the future?
Axel Garay (Meriam/Puerto Rican/Malaysian) is an emerging queer First Nations interdisciplinary artist and storyteller working with the still and moving image. He utilises digital video, installation and alternative photographic processes to explore themes of technology ethics, desire, spirituality and human psychology.
Drawing from Islamic mysticism, Christian allegory, and Chinese cosmology, Nightfall questions the boundaries of reality in an age where digital illusions blur truth.
The artist’s digital twin Salima Iman Khair al-Din traverses the liminal space between worlds—human and machine, seen and unseen, the tangible and the dreamed.
In collaboration with local fashion designer Wilson Jedd Adams, Salima becomes a conduit between worlds—her cyborg-esque presence symbolising the entanglement of human aspiration and machine logic.
Liwen Lian is a Hui-Chinese 回族 visual artist, designer, and community arts labourer. They hold a Bachelor of Interior Design (Honours) from RMIT University. Their practice explores how visual and material culture—objects, technologies, and environments—shape, distort, and re-imagine identities and notions of humanness.
Axel and Liwen’s works were selected by local award-winning curator, writer and art historian Nur Shkembi, former Next Wave Young Artistic Director MaggZ, alongside Next Wave’s CEO Elyse Goldfinch and Lead Program Producer Frances Robinson.
The Winter Windows series invited local artists to pitch video works responding to the theme ‘Possible Worlds: Imagined Futures’.
The series launched on Friday 4 July and will be screened from dusk until dawn until Sunday 18 August.
Throughout winter, 260 Sydney Road will also feature works by two local artists co-curated by Next Wave and Merri-bek: d duàn and Linda Loh.
Speculative Hybridity is a quasi-robust transhumanist orthosemic scaffolding to achieve metastable noise/meaning equilibrium.
d duàn is an experimental a/v artist preoccupied with spectacle, tech, (para)text and spatial magik/rituals, living and playing on unceded Wurundjeri land. Their speculative multi-lingual multi-lore practice is bookended by an evolving philosophy of slow working~slow living~pleasure.
Where are we going? and Golden Mist are abstract digital videos from the same body of work, which explores luminosity amidst complexity.
Both works are metaphors for our minds and life. My imagined future is one where all humans find their innate capacity to transcend the chaos of their mind and the outer world. A possible world is one where the luminosity of equanimity and clarity are the order of the day.
Linda Loh is a visual artist in Melbourne. Her multimedia works navigate the elusive form and materiality of digital space with transformed sources of light. She has had solo and group exhibitions in Australia, USA and Europe, with works curated into projection festivals, billboard projects, screenings and art galleries.
Winter Windows is one of four winter screening programs happening in Bullek-bek (Brunswick) throughout July and August. Take yourself on a tour Around the Block from Next Wave to Michelle Guglielmo Park (260 Sydney Road), Counihan Gallery and Blak Dot Gallery to see works from more than 10 different artists from near and far.
Artists are invited to display video works across Brunswick Mechanic Institute’s street-facing screens, responding to the theme: Possible Worlds: Imagined Futures.
At the heart of Next Wave’s Winter Windows series is an idea central to our vision: artists don’t just reflect the world—they shape it. Art is a way of holding space for complex truths, of listening deeply and dreaming together. In this spirit, we are calling for works that are attentive to peoples, places and possibilities—transforming Brunswick Mechanics Institute’s windows into portals that invite passersby to pause, reflect and reimagine our collective futures.
In a world shaped by artists, what would our imagined futures look like?
Apply here.
Applications close Wednesday 21 May, 2025
Download the Next Wave Winter Windows Application Guide (.pdf)
Download the Next Wave Winter Windows Application Guide (.docx)
…or read more below.
Through an open callout, two artists who live, work or study in Merri-bek will be selected to present video work across Next Wave’s Sydney Road-facing screens at Brunswick Mechanics Institute.
Through an open call out, two artists will be selected to present a two-channel video work on Next Wave’s street-facing screens at Brunswick Mechanics Institute. The works will be screened dusk-to-dawn for six weeks across July-August 2025.
Each artist will receive:
Your EOI will be considered by Next Wave staff, Merri-bek community and local artist, and the selection process will use the following criteria.
Online information session: Tuesday 6 May
Artist drop-in session 1: Thursday 8 May
Artist drop-in session 2: Thursday 15 May
Tuesday 6 May, 2025
Secretos de la Raíz – Innato by Kathleen Gonzalez, 2022, photo by Wild Hardt