See what’s on from our base in Brunswick and beyond ↓
Imagined as a contemporary theatre of sonic art, performance, experimental music, talks, criticism, audio workshops, and reading groups, Composite Radio is a platform supporting interdisciplinary, critical, and speculative work that attunes (to)/detunes (from) the currents of our time.
Part of a series of discursive and performative events accompanying the exhibition ‘The place we do not know is the place we are looking for’ at West Space and
Liquid Architecture.
Amplifying the mode of the gathering, the program assembles and attends to resonant practices that are intent on inventing languages to be able to hold ineffable dreams, desires and encounters, unfixed from the discretisation of time, bodies, and sensing.
Presented by Composite.
Curious about how leading arts organisations operate and envision the future of creative practice?
Join our industry discovery day to hear from Platform Arts, Westspace, Arts House, Rising, Asia TOPA and Footscray Community Arts.
This program is designed for early-career creative practitioners (including our Kickstart artists, who’ll be joining us) to build their knowledge and connections.
The artists in Place Made After the Story exhibit a tenderness in approach, bringing a poetic logic to their critical engagement with place. By revisiting public histories or familial memory, these works deal with the intricate relationships between locality, ecology, narrative, belonging and not belonging.
Presented by Composite in collaboration with KADIST.
Brought to you by Brunswick Music Festival, MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio) takes over the Brunswick Mechanics Institute for the first time with New Waveforms.
RMIT’s CAST research group and Next Wave invite you to the launch of ‘Art and Memorialisation: Truth-Telling Through Creative Practice in Settler Colonial Australia (2024)’. This event will be convened by oral historian, Genevieve Grieves, and artist and researcher, Amy Spiers.
Neighbourhood Noise is an open invitation for the community to experience live music and experimental arts programming by Arts Merri-bek partners Next Wave, the Counihan Gallery and Composite.
Next Wave is collaborating with Speak Percussion to present ‘Percussion, Conversation, Degustation’.
Next Wave is supporting artist and mentor Leisa Shelton to deliver her next iteration of ‘Considering Practice’ at Brunswick Mechanics Institute.
Considering Practice is a focused investigation into the core principles, values and intentions that underpin each individual’s independent arts practice.
This full-day workshop is $125. Places are limited.
To book, contact Leisa via email.
Next Wave Young Artistic Director MaggZ is presenting an interactive game-performance with street dance, sound, audio-visual installation for the Asian-diasporic community.
Played simultaneously across two spaces, audiences are invited to watch the game unfold from behind the scenes, or experience how their actions can change the rules of SpringCity 43214.
Next Wave is partnering with A Climate for Art (ACFA) to deliver the ACFA Symposium.
The symposium aims to build relationships and extend a vocabulary around how culture underpins the climate crisis—and how culture is in turn affected by environmental imbalance.
Over two days, ACFA will relay what they have learnt so far and bring together a range of speakers.
Esther Carlin and Adalya Nash Hussein explore the psychogeography of grief in the first Melbourne speaking from the I eye program.
Presented by Composite
Finite Eyes brings together live performance, pre-recorded sound and moving image to explore the emotive pull and mobilising force of utopian visions.
By anorak and Ora Clementi in collaboration with Debris Facility and Melody Woodnutt and featuring work by Basma al-Sharif, Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards, Charles Bernstein, Marguerite Duras, and Dani ReStack.
Presented by Composite
Young Artistic Director Lydia Tesema is bringing her annual Below The Surface (BTS) vision board and networking event to Brunswick Mechanics Institute.
Connect with likeminded local creatives while creating visual representation of your goals, dreams and aspirations.
Next Wave is supporting the development of ‘Inheritance’, a new production by Ryan Enniss and Robert Lewis.
Inheritance stems from a project investigating neurodiversity in Australian performing arts. It explores themes of toxic masculinity, relationships and anxiety through a kaleidoscopic journey of interconnected monologues.
Contact Persona Collective for more information.
Convened by CAST leader Dr Amy Spiers, ‘Activating Truth’ brings together artists and researchers from across Naarm/Melbourne, other parts of so-called ‘Australia’, as well as Turtle Island/Canada, to share and deepen knowledge on ways that the truth about settler colonial violence can be activated responsibly and impactfully in community and localised contexts through creative practice.
Masculinity, race and boyhood simmer in this stylish slow-cinema debut about a Filipino-Australian father and his six-year-old son, who are navigating a family divorce.
Presented by Composite in partnership with Sunburnt.
Join us for a free workshop celebrating the richness of Deaf culture and language, led by Deaf artist Luke D King.
Luke will share an introduction to Deaf histories and give participants the opportunity to learn and use some basic Australian Sign Language (Auslan).
Flow Festival presents ‘Triangle’—a unique series of lighting design workshops led by Bronwyn Pringle (Deaf Kitchen, SPIN, and Flow Festival). Bronwyn is diving into how lighting design can be more inclusive for the Deaf community.
‘Triangle’ is for the Deaf community, including Deaf, hard of hearing, CODAs, and interpreters.
Join us for a drink, explore our venue, hear about what we have planned and help shape our priorities for 2025 and beyond.
See a special screening of commissioned works from Homing Instinct—a collaborative moving image project featuring artist commissions related to housing, home and belonging.
This screening includes an artist talk by Ari Angkasa.
Presented by Composite.
Join our working bee with WORLDWIDEWORMS.NET, an online space for peer-led publishing. In this event, collaborators and contributors to WORLDWIDEWORMS.NET share work in progress, including video screenings, readings, and a garden tour of the back-end of the website.
Contributing artists are Alrey Batol, Eric Jong, Jacina Leong, Ella Peck and Emily Simek.
Presented by Composite
‘Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror’ is widely regarded to be the first and best vampire film ever made. Join us for a Halloween screening of this silent cinematic masterpiece with an original score performed live by Edwin Montgomery.
This selection of short video works made between 1997 and 2008, range from quickly captured playful scenarios to elaborately constructed narratives. Established in Naarm Melbourne in 1995, DAMP’s multidisciplinary practice over three decades has consistently addressed the relationship between artist and audience and examined individual and collective notions of value and desire.
Presented by Composite
Join us for the premiere of a new experimental performance lecture by Catherine Ryan. This ambitious, research-based work tells the tragicomic story of one of the neoclassical statues adorning the interior of Victoria’s Legislative Council in Parliament House. The work draws on the comedic travails of this political decor to critically examine the idea of connection to tradition and the telling of origin stories about the settler-colonial society of Victoria.
Presented by Composite
ShareHouse invites you into Next Wave’s home, Brunswick Mechanics Institute, for community-led workshops, performances, and conversations.
Curated by our Young Artistic Directorate - Banda
Get Tickets
↳ Saturday | Studio Day: Workshop 1 (Charlie Taylor) + Lunch & Panel
↳ Saturday | Studio Day: Workshop 2 (Adele D’Souza) + Lunch & Panel
↳ Sunday | Exhibition
Bus Projects, Engages, MEga Yoga is a participatory embodied performance that uses the structure of a yoga class inviting participants to move their bodies slowly and their minds critically.
Guest curator Rachael Archibald (Meanjin/Brisbane) has gathered lineup of artists pushing boundaries in their music-making for the next New North concert.
Alexandra Spence ~ Ode2Joy ~ ANNIHA
Next Wave is supporting the THINKING GROUND workshop series, a pilot artist-development program by theatre-makers The Voice in My Hands. Workshops are free but places are limited.
Learn more about THINKING GROUND and register for the next workshop
Guest curator Dale Gorfinkel brings lineup of Narrm/Melbourne-based musicians pushing boundaries in their areas of practice to Brunswick Mechanics:
Sounds Like Movement [Peter Fraser/Dale Gorfinkel] ~ Shh! [Anja Füsti/Rosalind Crisp] ~ Peter Blamey
Get tickets to New North Concert 16
Get tickets to New North Concert 15
Xiaole Zhan ~ Jassy Robertson ~ Tilman Robinson
Xiaole will present a ‘live anthology’ for narrator, percussion, violin, electronics and narrator—a musical setting of a collection of poems exploring the collision between music and language.
Sonic Travellers seeks to discover shared connections between sonic pasts and presents, exploring regional affinities between Australia and Southeast Asia.
The 2024 LAB program considers Next Wave’s past, present and future – with a focus on intergenerational knowledge sharing and creative responses to notions of collectivism, preservation and care – culminating in a future-focused 40th birthday party.
The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network is thrilled to host an evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with Nam Le.
Next Wave x (nexus) is a multi-sensory Radical hospitality event of experimental dance battles, cuisines and a party.
Our Young Artistic Directorate are co-curating a party in partnership with Brunswick Music Festival
Countercurrents: Department of Lost notes
Jacqui Shelton
Fri 4 Feb – Sat 6 Mar
Public Program Sat 6 Mar, 2pm | Register here
Closing Celebration Sat 6 Mar, 4pm
Brunswick Mechanics
Department of Lost Notes is a four-channel video that attempts to capture the impact of receiving large amounts of emotionally charged data (texts, poems, quotes, emails) from the perspective of a digital device. Department of Lost Notes operates from a speculative position that imagines a smart phone organising by the digital interactions that replace face-to-face during lockdowns and periods of isolation. Department of Lost Notes gathers multiple experiences of isolation through the intermediary of a phone, anonymising and collating diverse text submissions from the public that capture their digitised personal thoughts.
Presented as part of Countercurrents a new public art commissioning partnership between Next Wave and Moreland City Council. Countercurrents is intended to support both site-specific and community-based public art projects.
Want to contribute?
Next Wave and Jacqui Shelton invite you to participate in Department of Lost Notes: Working Group public program where participants will contribute text from their notes app towards a collective document of digital experience. The artist will guide groups through a process of editing and physical orientation, that will inscribe texts developed collaboratively as walks in the local vicinity of Brunswick Mechanics.
Department of Lost Notes Public Program
Sat 6 Mar, 2pm | Register here
This process will develop a series of multiple stories and texts that participants can share as a walk and recite to friends and family, as a record of collective experiences of distance and the varied differences within these text-based representations.
This work archives community submissions to construct a collective experience of isolation and distance. You are invited to contribute personal notes to be included in the work via this link.
Jacqui Shelton is an artist and writer born on Barada Barna land, central QLD, and based in Narrm, Melbourne. Her work uses text, performance, filmmaking and photography to explore the complications of performance and presence, and how voice, language, and image can collaborate or undermine one another. Jacqui is especially interested in how emotion and embodied experience can be made public and activated to reveal a complex politics of living-together, and the tensions this makes visible.
Jacqui Shelton, Department of Lost Notes (video still), 2022