RISING is a new winter arts festival in Melbourne that has taken the place of the Melbourne International Arts Festival and White Night. It has a mix of ticketed and free events around the city. Tonight alongside a total lunar eclipse and rare super blood moon was the opening night. RISING has done a lot to make the festival COVID-safe with many events occurring outdoors, but unfortunately a potential snap lockdown is looming in the next couple days due to a new cluster of cases from a hotel quarantine breach in Adelaide.
Ebony and I met up with her friends Jenni and Tony in Chinatown and started our evening at the Golden Square car park. The works at this location were curated by Grace Herbert under the theme Inland Tides. We climbed up to the roof of the car park where we could watch projections on neighboring buildings, and then saw the different works on each level as we walked back down to street level. Some of my favorite pieces were Reko Rennie's short film Initiation OA_RR, Lu Yang's inflated head Power of will - final shooting, and Monira Al Qadiri's floating hamburger The End.
Also part of Golden Square but projected onto a neighboring car park wall was Atong Atem's short film Banksia, which tells the stories of Australia's first African settlers.
After grabbing some dinner in Chinatown we said farewell to Jenni and then headed down to Hamer Hall for the light projection piece Ancestral Memory by Maree Clarke and Mitch Mahoney. It showed the metaphor of the Spirit Eel, which connects time and place for the peoples of the Kulin Nation.
RISING runs until 6 June 2021.
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