What's On
See what’s on from our base in Brunswick and beyond ↓
Deaf Culture and Auslan workshop
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).
Screening: 'Anak'
Next up from Composite:
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 in partnership with Sunburnt.
Triangle by Flow Festival
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.
Next Wave Neighbours
Join us for a drink, explore our venue, hear about what we have planned and help shape our priorities for 2025 and beyond.
Archive
Homing Instinct
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.
'Web Working Bee'
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.
Nosferatu with live score
‘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.
DAMP video anthology
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.
Snap! (You Have Nothing to Reconnect But Your Chains)
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.
'ShareHouse: Studio Day + Exhibition'
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
MEga Yoga: A counternarrative experience
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.
New North Concert 17
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
THINKING GROUND
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
New North Concert 16
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
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: Opening Performance
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.
Across the Ocean: Viet Thanh Nguyen in Conversation with Nam Le
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)
Next Wave x (nexus) is a multi-sensory Radical hospitality event of experimental dance battles, cuisines and a party.
International Women's Day Performance
Our Young Artistic Directorate are co-curating a party in partnership with Brunswick Music Festival
Radical Hospitality: 剉冰 + equatorial fruit-opening party
Dead Ends and Detours - Bruno Booth
Leisuretime I — Aaron Claringbold & Rebecca Mccauley
Secretos de la Raíz - Innato
Wed 11 May - Sat 25 June
Performance & Conversation: Sun 19 Jun, 1.30pm
Presented in partnership with Emerging Writers’ Festival
📍 Brunswick Mechanics, 270 Sydney Road, Brunswick
Secretos de la Raíz - Innato is a multi-dimensional video installation that investigates ancestral knowledge, and the spiritual and physical connections shared across generations, cultures and continents.
Developed specifically for Countercurrents, the work is a new site-specific piece drawing on concepts developed for Secretos de la Raíz.
Originally performed as part of the 2021 YIRRAMBOI Festival, Secretos de la Raíz brought together 13 professional artists from a range of disciplines and cultural heritage to explore ancestral knowledge in the contemporary landscape.
In this new iteration, footage and multimedia from the original work made by Coya Films has been curated and crafted to create a new visual dialogue for projection across four screens at Brunswick Mechanics. Kathleen Gonzalez and Sermsah Bin Saad will connect with the installation and share their explorations - encapsulating heritage, spirit and soul as a symbol of Aboriginal cultural revival and resilience – in a performance and conversation on Sunday 19 June.
Artist Bios
Kathleen Gonzalez is a Melbourne-based Colombian contemporary artist, cultural art producer, ethno dance writer, artistic director and founder of Tunjos y Cantaros Ethnologic Dance Company & Ethnodanceology Art.
As a intercultural creative producer, Kathleen applies a curatorial framework of crossover practices to her work, encouraging resonance between art forms and utilising disciplines such as anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, and ethnography to facilitate community cultural exchange on ecological, political, and social conditions.
During the past two years, Kathleen’s creative work was challenged due to the social restrictions. Always striving for new original forms of movement and inclusive expression her practice now embraces new technological skills and opportunities.
Kathleen was recently granted art residencies with Regional Arts Victoria CWS, the Australia Council of Arts, Creative Victoria and Abbotsford Convent PIVOT 2021 Arts Program. As part of “BARRING YANABUL-YIRRAMBOI” STREET TO STAGE 2019-2021, Kathleen received an Arts Development Project grant, commissioned by the City of Melbourne.
Sermsah Bin Saad’s name in the Indigenous community is synonymous with theatre, television, film, festival circuits, opera, dance and choreography. He was in the top 14 on “So You Think You Can Dance Australia’ in 2008 and made history as the first ever Indigenous/Contemporary dancer on commercial television.
A Radio Broadcaster with his own show ‘Urban Dreaming’ about Bridging the Gap, Sermsah is also a facilitator on empowerment of cultural and spiritual development in education using the medium of the Arts as a tool to educate society. Above all his artistic achievements, Sermsah values his heritage. A proud Nyikina man from the Kimberley’s, he believes in “Liyan” a saying springing from his hometown of Broome/Derby WA meaning connection to country, spirit and instinctual knowledge.
Sermsah advocates through his facilitations for Aboriginal Australians on the terrible atrocities of colonialism and the displacement of his own people in his own country. He says, ‘We have been subjected to this for too long, since colonisation and it still continues systemically today. Enough is Enough. Sovereignty was never ceded.
Accessibility
The performance & conversation on Sun 19 June will be Auslan interpreted and will take place outdoors, in the Brunswick Mechanics courtyard.
In the event of wet weather, the performance will be moved indoors.
Brunswick Mechanics is a wheelchair accessible venue.
For further information on how Next Wave can support your access requirements, please contact our team on (03) 9387 3376 or email us at hello@nextwave.org.au
Artistic Director/Producer - Kathleen Gonzalez (Ethnodanceology Art)
Performer/Collaborator – Sermsah Bin Saad
Video Art - Brian Lee Silva (Coya Films)
Music Composer - Sebastian Barahona (Sound Epiphany)
Fashion Designer - Tamara Leacock (REMUSE)
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.
Kathleen Gonzalez, Secretos de la Raiz (video still), 2022