Around Melbourne

The ninth edition of Melbourne Design Week will bring 11 days of exhibitions, talks and workshops to the city in late autumn. More than 350 inventive events will be presented during the festival, cementing its status as Australia’s largest annual design event. Each year brings a new theme for Melbourne Design Week and this year’s is ‘Design The World You Want’. The theme is designed to encourage people to express, question, propose and test ideas about the world around us. Projects involved might offer solutions that heal, replenish and enable life, revealing design as an act of repair and transformation. Highlights include A New Normal, an exhibition featuring a collection of designs to make Melbourne a self-sufficient city by 2030; a retrospective of lighting designer Volker Haug; a spectacular showcase of 100 dazzling and avant-garde contemporary lights at North Melbourne's Meat Market Stables; and presentations by leading showrooms, studios and makers like Trent Jansen, Jessie French, Fiona Lynch, Cult and more. The Melbourne Art Book Fair will also be celebrating its 11th year, and will run its popular stallholder fair in the NGV’s Great Hall from May 15-17.  Melbourne Design Week is presented by Creative Victoria and delivered by the NGV. You can view the full festival program and book tickets here. Inspired by the book fair? Check out the best independent bookstores in Melbourne.

As a chill settles over the city each winter, Rising returns with a nocturnal vengeance. This year, the much-loved arts festival will take place across twelve nights from June 4-15, with a red-hot program featuring 65 events, 327 artists and nine world premieres. Musical highlights include an exclusive Australian performance by British indie-pop girlie Suki Waterhouse; a one-off show by Beth Gibbons of Portishead fame, who will bring her haunting solo album Lives Outgrown to Hamer Hall; and Brooklyn rap legends Black Star (aka Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli) live on stage in Melbourne for the first time ever. Joining them on the line-up will also be Japanese Breakfast, Marlon Williams, Forest Swords and Mount Kimbie. On the first Saturday of the festival (June 7), Fed Square will be taken over by Blockbuster – a vibrant celebration of South Asian culture featuring contemporary Pakistani music, an eye-catching Punjabi truck art installation and plenty of delicious street food.  Flinders Street Station will double as a mini golf course when Swingers – The Art of Mini Golf takes over. This immersive (and fully playable) exhibition will include works by some of the world’s most dynamic and boundary-pushing female-identifying artists. The Capitol Theatre will also be transformed thanks to a massive kinetic light installation by Shohei Fujimoto. If it's a break from the hustle and bustle of life you're after, Korean artist Woopsyang's viral “do nothing” challenge comes to QV Square,...