Carriageworks

Things are about to get a whole lot more glittery at Carriageworks. Utilising the artists’ skills in costume design, performance and photography, this major new exhibition by Melbourne-based collaborative duo the Huxleys will honour legendary queer artists lost to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The exhibition will include large-scale photographic works, video art and a big opening night live art party. For those who are not yet acquainted, the Huxleys are a dynamic duo of cataclysmic proportions who present camp commentary and spectacle across the visual art, performance and entertainment sectors. The exhibition will also feature a durational collaborative installation that invites the community to contribute panels to be sewn together into a quilt, reminiscent of the AIDS Memorial Quilts created during the ’80s and ’90s. Bloodlines is a heartfelt tribute to LGBTQIA+ artists, including Leigh Bowery, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring and Sylvester, that continue to inspire the practices of the Huxleys and countless artists working today. Everyone is invited to get into the disco rhythm of it all at the Opening Night Party on Wednesday, January 4 (7-10.30pm), featuring live performances from The Huxleys, Betty Grumble, Aaron Manhattan, Benjamin Hancock, Felicia Foxx, Simone Page Jones and banging tunes from DJ Charlie Villas. The Huxleys will debut the first performance of their disco song ‘Bloodlines’ written to accompany the exhibition, as well as perform their own hymn-like version

A major new immersive installation by one of Australia’s most important multidisciplinary artists comes to Carriageworks for Sydney Festival. Paul Yore’s work engages with the histories of religious art and ritual, queer identity, pop-culture and neo-liberal capitalism, recasting a vast array of found images, materials and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux and sculptural assemblages which celebrate hybrid and fluid identities, unstable and contradictory meanings, and the glowing horizon of queer worldmaking. Word Made Flesh is a new architecturally-scaled installation, anarchically composed of improvised makeshift structures, mixed media sculpture and found objects, collage and assemblage, painting, video, and pulsating sound and light. Conceived as a cacophonous, kaleidoscopic ‘gesamtkunstwerk’, this exhibition imagines a queer alternative reality, erected from the wasteland of the Anthropocene, performatively implicating itself into the debased spectacle of hyper-capitalist society. With The Huxleys' Bloodlines glistening and glittering alongside this exhibtion, Carriageworks will be a portal to queer new reality this summer.

It’s imperative that you do not eat before you visit the Carriageworks Farmers Markets. You’ll want to save maximum belly space for your personal version of The Bachelorette where you decide who gets your dollars and what delicious produce gets to come home with you. Maybe you like something soupy and savoury first thing? In that case go for the pho stand for a traditional Vietnamese start to the day. There’s a bibimbap stall that will even replace the rice with shredded cauliflower if you don’t believe in cheat days, and a classic bacon and egg roll for creatures of habit, from Farmer Rod’s Free Range stall. Once the hounds of your hunger have been quieted it’s time to prepare for your next meal, or seven. Maybe you need the sweet bite of Pickle Hill’s Worcester sauce for the pantry? Or some fresh goat’s curd from Willowbrae? While you’re there you may as well get some smoked salmon, fresh ravioli from Pasta Emilia, free range eggs, a load of beer and barley bread form the Bread and Butter Project, and some jersey milk butter to go on it. You can spend a whole lot of money if you want to here, but equally you could just grab a kombucha on tap and find a chair for some of the best dog-watching in the city. Hungry for more? Look at our list of the best markets in Sydney – produce or otherwise.