Best Arts Event - who won?
Of all the exhibitions, festivals, performances, parades and creative love-ins in 2009 which Sydney arts event sent the biggest bolts of high voltage lightning into your cerebral cortex?
The nominees are:
Starting in Sydney in 2003, Semi-Permanent is a week long celebration of design – graphic, film, art, illustration, web, graf, stop-motion, animation and more. Comprising a conference, workshops, parties and exhibitions, Semi-Permanent brought the most exciting designers to Sydney (and Australia & NZ), having used the last seven years as a breeding ground for creative thought and exciting conversation around design.
This was a landmark theatrical event for Sydney. Spanning eight of Shakespeare’s History plays and close to 100 years of English history, the new STC helmed by Cate Blanchett and husband Andrew Upton made seven hours in a seat the most intriguing, engaging and enlightening theatre experience of the year. Director Benedict Andrew’s fractured yet compelling adaptation of the original texts used a star cast to look at the power in language and the parables to be found in re-imagining ye olde classics.
There Goes the Neighbourhood was an exhibition, residency, discussion and publishing project at Performance Space in May 2009. Focusing on the politics of urban space, particularly in Redfern, the project looked at the complexity of gentrification and urban change. Curated by Zanny Begg and Keg De Souza and bringing together artists from Australia and around the world, this show was both an exhibition and an ongoing investigation of the politics of community and space.
Opting for cultural crave rather than cultural cringe, design duo Romance Was Born (Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales) created the fashion event of the year with their Australian Fashion Week show in April. Their Spring/Summer collection, Dollies and Pearls, Oysters and Shells, was part Grandma’s Pearls of Wisdom (think iced VoVo, hydrangeas and crocheted nana blankies) and part aquamarine adventure (merman + harp-playing mermaid) and, above all, a treasure trove of fashion art.
A celebration of the renaissance of drawing, the MCA's I Walk The Line presented the best of Australian art - pen to paper style. Featuring 29 artists from across Oz, this exhibition explored different approaches to contemporary drawing extending to two and three dimensional works, cell animation, performance and video. An insightful look into the penmanship that happens in this country when there are no words involved, it made us wish we were back in school - doodling on a notebook inspired by David Campese, great hair or, quite simply, the re-discovered joy of drawing.
Veteran sculptor Ken Unsworth chose Cockatoo Island for his largest creation yet. Installed as a tribute for his late wife Elisabeth, A Ringing Glass was originally for a private showing – an extravagant banquet for 168 in the Island’s Turbine Hall. But the lifelong-love-lost lament proved so mesmeric for Sydney it opened to the public days later, in four installations built from pianos, rocks, a doll’s cot, skeletons, a glass bell, all of them followed by a video of the original event. Moving and magnificent.
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