Presented by Performance Space, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art is your destination for the very best provocative, boundary-pushing work from around Australia and across the entire Asia-Pacific region. Now in its seventh year, the festival will run online for five days from October 20-24. The festival’s traditional home at Carriageworks is being utilised as a performance and broadcast space, enabling Liveworks to reach an even wider audience than ever before.
Corralled by Performance Work’s the ever-inventive artistic director Jeff Khan, it’s an ambitious program of performances, installations, parties, workshops and conversations. All up, there are 31 events featuring over 72 artists. The program encompasses three streams: LIVE NOW, the presentation of captivating, bold new experimental art from the Asia-Pacific; LIVE DREAMS, a dynamic platform for works-in-progress; and LIVE FUTURES, a series of artist conversations.
Highlights include Day For Night 2021, a night of queer performance and club music, bringing the community together in an interactive online loungeroom party hosted by Kelly Lovemonster and Stelly G, featuring the likes of Stereogamous, Grumble Boogie, Jamaica Moana, Weird Nest and special guests Joe Pol and Aaron Manhattan. Sue Healey’s On View: Panoramic Suite is a sweeping, panoramic video installation depicting dance across cultures, landscapes and individuals created over eight years and three countries. The live broadcast component features acclaimed dance artists Nalina Wait and Martin del Amo, along with live percussionist Laurence Pike, thread portraits by Jane Theau, and music by Darrin Verhagen.
Public Speaking explores the liminal space between performance, art and podcasting, with a series of conversations between Field Theory and a number of young people from the LGBTIQA+ community of Sydney, with a new broadcast every afternoon inviting us to walk with and listen to their experiences of queer life in the city. Dance artist Ivey Wawn presents the latest iteration of In Perpetuity, a video work featuring three dancers performing dressage choreography as a metaphor for the pressures of a life under wage labour capitalism. This provocative work will be followed by a conversation between Ivey Wawn and choreographer, performer and researcher Lizzie Thomson.
Hundreds + Thousands (Multi-City): Virtual Nursery is a unique online art event featuring an exhibition of one hundred digital artefacts created by gardeners and their produce around the world, assembled under the guidance artists Daniel Kok and Luke George. It’ll be viewable online every evening, with the series of specially conceived workshops and exhibitions culminating as live performance presentations in Sydney, Perth, and Hong Kong in 2022. The Order of Autophagia: The supper of terror, the lunch for the uncanny, unapologetic snacks on the apocalyptic moment tackles the taboo subject of cannibalism. A participatory dinner hosted by artist Natasha Tontey, it asks us to question colonialist assumptions about the practice of cannibalism, particularly in light of our current ecological issues and our seemingly terminal need for commercial consumption. How do you cope with constant beginnings? Amrita Hepi in conversation Mish Grigor began life as a performance, but now the acclaimed makers will be discussing how art and artists respond to change, both in the current climate and specifically in the often uncertain life of the working artist.
For more info on any of these events and way more, and to book tickets, check out Liveworks on the Performance Space website here.
