North Melbourne’s Meat Market is one of Melbourne’s hidden gems. I, myself only work two minutes walk from it and I barely know what goes on there. During the Next Wave Festival, which has just drawn to a close, it was home to Structural Integrity, which describes itself as a monumental World’s Fair-styled exhibition and residency project that explores independent arts cultures from across Australia and Asia and includes the work of six Australian and five Asian Artist Run Iniatives (ARIs)
In the month leading up to the opening of the Next Wave Festival, each ARI created its own ‘pavilion’ inside the Meat Market. Those who created ‘pavilions’ were:
- FELTspace, Adelaide
- Locksmith Project Space, Sydney
- Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space, Brisbane
- Art Centre Ongoing, Tokyo
- Six_a INC, Hobart
- Post Museum, Singapore
- Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou
- West Space, Melbourne
- Y3K, Melbourne
- House of Natural Fibre, Yogyakarta
- Tutok, Manila
My personal favourite was Supercharger by Six-a INC, partly because it was interactive and partly because it contained giant remote controlled vehicles called super-mobile-art-devices that observers can manoeuvre around the installation. It is the artists’ intention of giving the fate of the piece over to the visitors. Below is a video that I took of someone else using the installation, although my efforts weren’t much better.
Another installation that grabbed my attention was the effort was by West Space which included a Giant Smoke Ring Generator. However, during my visit it wasn’t in operation but the video below shows it in full flight.
