31/7/2015
Underbelly Arts Festival
Cockatoo Island, Sydney
The Festival will see over 35 works installed across the iconic Cockatoo Island, in the middle of Sydney Harbour. Audiences will experience live art, performance, sound, visual art, dance, animation, film and music.
The biennial Underbelly Arts Festival celebrates the work of over 100 early career artists. It is unique in that it supports exhibiting and performing artists with a program of residencies and workshops (The Lab) that culminates in a two-day festival of curated talks, tours and a program of music, food, kids activities and, for audiences, it’s the opportunity to experience dynamic new work by a diverse collection of bold new voices in contemporary art.
2015 will see over 35 works installed across the iconic Cockatoo Island, in the middle of Sydney Harbour. Audiences will experience live art, performance, sound, visual art, dance, animation, film and music that is immersive, participatory and site responsive from a collection of the best new artists in Australia and beyond. For the first time the festival will include an International Program, supported by the Keir Foundation, with work by artists from Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK and Iran.
As part of this program, Underbelly Arts will welcome Gregory Stauffer and Bastien Gauchet through a programming partnership with Les Urbaines, Switzerland. Across their two-week residency, the artists will work site specifically to develop a spatial performance series in which they focus on process, measurement and anamorphosis.
Furthering connections with Western Europe, Underbelly Arts will play host to Josephine van Rheenen and De Dansers in partnership with Over Het Ij Festival. Across Cockatoo Island’s vast industrial terrain this performance will rework Betonder, developed site specifically at two previous locations—the industrial riverside upon Over Het Ij, and on the island of Terschelling for the Oerol Festival. Here De Dansers physically inhabit the uninhabitable, placing the vulnerability and softness of body against the harsh terrain of the Island’s docks.
Coming to Australia for the first time, UK rising star James Capper brings his interest in the aesthetics of mechanical power and hydraulics to a country built on the virtues of industry, and the historical homeground of that—the industrial precinct of Cockatoo Island. With his works HYDRA STEP and HYDRA SHUFFLE Capper draws influence from the Land art movement, dismissing traditional art materials to create a series of Earth Marking works that challenge art’s relationship to both the natural world and technology.
To complete Underbelly Arts’ inaugural international program, the festival will support the development of new work from Iran’s Shirin Abedinirad. Working across performance, video and installation, Abedinirad will build a pyramid of mirrors on Cockatoo Island, inspired by the Ziggurat in ancient Mesopotamia. The work offers a transformative view of the self, urging audiences to critically engage with the links between history and today.
This program continues a longstanding relationship with the Keir Foundation, a relationship that has supported the festival’s exponential growth as it enters its sixth iteration. These artists will join a program that showcases the work of more than 100 of the next generation of great Australian artists, working site-specifically in residence in the middle of Sydney Harbour. This program includes artists across performance, dance, installation, moving image, music, sound and sculpture, and is one of Australia’s premium development and showcase opportunities for early career artists. In 2015 Underbelly Arts matches its international program with a program that brings focus to the first Australians, featuring a selection of new work from Aboriginal artists.
About Underbelly Arts
Underbelly Arts was conceived in 2007 as a unique model that provides unparalleled opportunities to early career artists. Through a prioritisation of risk taking and exceptional artistic endeavour UA supports an emerging generation of artists in the development, creation and presentation of their work, and in connecting them with audiences and with other artists across Australia and internationally. UA is recognised for championing artists early in their careers and for introducing audiences, artists and industry to the work of Australia’s next great artists.
August 1–2, 2015
Cockatoo Island
Sydney Harbour, Australia