About

A Government of Artists

15 – 31 May
28 commissions
17 days 
Across Melbourne

In early 2019, Next Wave put out a national call for artists to form a Government. Responding to a divisive political ecology, major environmental destabilisation, growing economic inequality, and competing historical and cultural narratives, we invited artists to set the agenda for change.

We have devised and developed this program in collaboration with an inspiring and visionary cohort of Festival artists over eighteen months. The conversations have been deep, critical, generous and illuminating. The Festival has emerged from these conversations as a collective demonstration, harnessing that amorphous and indefinable energy called art, to rethink how we can be together in this time and place.

Next Wave Festival 2020: A Government of Artists asks, ‘What is possible if we centre ourselves in a politics of hospitality and multiplicity? What can we achieve together?’ We invite you to join us for 17 days, to listen and participate in this critical, courageous and celebratory act. This is not governance as you know it.