E m e r g e D presents New Ruins for the 2006 Next Wave Festival curated by Amy Sales (UK) and Tai Snaith (Au).

New Ruins will showcase new site-specific work by contemporary artists from Australia and the UK, as they respond to the unique city centre site of Melbourne’s former City Watch House.

This international residency with exhibition presents new work by: Sally Blenheim, Chris Hill, Geoff Robinson, Jessica Russell, Michael Tait, Jensen Tjhung and Emile Zile from Melbourne alongside six Glasgow-based artists: Steven Dickie, Danny Holcroft, Martine Myrup, Jonathan Scott, Alexandra P. Spaulding and Katri Walker.

Together, the thirteen artists will expose the breadth of talent practicing across both cities, as the former City Watch House becomes a platform for the exploration of new and challenging contemporary visual arts practice.

In addition to the residency with exhibition E m e r g e D will produce a publication with commissioned essays by Ruth Barker (UK) and Ric Spencer (Au).

Exhibition

8-10 pm
16th March - 1st April 2006
Closed Sundays & Mondays

Preview

8-10 pm
Friday, 17th March 2006

Venue

The former City Watch House
Russell Street, Melbourne 3000
Owned by The National Trust of Australia

Curatorial Statement

When the structures that surround us crumble we see the moment when art
creeps into the cracks of life: as a shadow of post-modern ruined theory, New Ruins is inspired by the forgotten monuments to an industrial past - the litter of the grandiose in fragments of decay or entropy, regeneration or repair.

New Ruins as culture is reclaimed by nature, and the empires by which we abide finally crash and burn.

New Ruins in the frozen moments of terror entombed in the digital mass of the media and perpetually exhumed; in Klein’s Disaster Capitalism as sites of trauma transform to Terra Nullius, as life and aspiration stand in tatters.

New Ruins as the gleaming icons of culture become faded relics, and tangled wilderness finally obliterates the empty floodlit billboards of our imagination.