Image: ‘Late Speculation’ by NONOTAK, 2013
Sugar Mountain, the sense-engulfing festival hosted by Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and Melbourne Arts Precinct have announced its line-up for an event that is not so much a music festival as a full-blown immersive experience.
Festival tickets go on sale 12pm Monday 19 October, with the event itself happening Saturday 23 January across the VCA campus and the arts precinct.
This year Sugar Mountain features an expanded visual art component, including the winner of the newly-minted Sugar Mountain Art Prize and an array of vibrant work from renowned artists.
Much space will be given to the festival’s musical line-up and in between audiences can spend some time in the plush ‘Executive Sweet’ area (the baby of Sugar Mountain, Art Series Hotel Group and Pop & Scott ) to recover from the blistering sets of Hot Chip, Dirty Three or Courtney Barnett.
For those who like to eat their art as well as watch, hear and wear it; there is also Sensory, an experimental festival dining concept that banishes banishes the baked potatoes and burgers of regular festivals in favour of creative tapas, conceived by Sugar Mountain along with Bomba, Tin & Ed and Cut Copy.
Here’s a taste of the art offerings that will have you lining up for those tickets:
NONOTAK
International World Premiere of ground-breaking work from the Japan/France duo
“Part visual art installation and part electronic music performance, NONOTAK’s creations – with names like Daydream, Isotopes and Dream Collapse – are a spectacle to behold, and an incomparable universe of sound metamorphosis, easy enough to get lost within.” – Mutek Festival, Barcelona
Often we look abroad to world-class innovators showcasing profound new works in interesting spaces. They floored us in 2015 upon their first visit to our shores, and now Sugar Mountain is proud to present a World Premiere at 2016’s event – a brand new headline installation by the one and only NONOTAK: illustrator Noemi Schipfer and artitect/musician Takami Nakamoto.
Just last month fashion giant Hermès commissioned NONOTAK to create a motorised installation for their display store in Istanbul, Turkey. In June 2015 London art lovers were stunned by the duo’s installation at the UK’s Tate Modern (read about it here).
A collaborative duo based in Paris, NONOTAK create otherworldly light and sound installations unlike anything on the planet. If you caught them on site in 2015, you have the idea… but think bigger. NONOTAK have to be seen to be believed. Building ethereal, immersive and dreamlike environments, worlds you become totally lost in, at SM 2016 NONOTAK will return with their most anticipated and ambitious work yet. www.nonotak.com
fuse*
Australian Exclusive
Ljos by fuse* Photo:Enrico Maria Bertani
Headed to Australia for to join the Sugar Mountain line-up for the first time is acclaimed Italian multi-media collective fuse*, an art and design factory founded by Luca Camellini and Mattia Carretti in 2007. fuse* aim to explore the expressive potential provided by the creative use of coding and digital technologies, working in the intersection of architecture, installation, technological innovation, visual and sound design.
Their work includes Ljós, a live media performance that translates dreams into visual reality and has recently toured to Prague, Manchester and Taiwan; Cloud, a virtual tour through Wikipedia, an exhibition that continually expands just like the cloud; Snowfall which explores the potential of artificial viewing techniques ; and N 4.0, an interactive multimedia performance based on the real-time interaction between sound, movement and light.
‘We wish every performance were this mesmerising,’ - Huffington Post.
DANIEL ASKILL
Australian exclusive
Daniel Askill is a New York-based Australian filmmaker and visual artist. The New York Times describes his work as “visually stunning”. Both of his Grammy nominated videos with Sia, ‘Chandelier’ and ‘Elastic Heart’ have been viewed over a billion times online. In 2001 he co-found multidisciplinary studio Collider, which produced his multi-award winning short film We Have Decided Not To Die. Daniel’s work as an artist has been showcased at venues including Palais de Tokyo Paris, institute of contemporary arts London and the Venice Biennale. He has directed music videos for artists such as Paul McCartney, U.N.K.L.E, Sia, Placebo, Digitalism, These New Puritans and Phoenix, in addition to global campaigns and fashion films for brands including Cadillac, Dior, Smirnoff, Xbox, Sony, Mercedes and Alexander McQueen.
Nic Hamilton
‘Kenzo’ © Nic Hamilton
Melbourne’s Nic Hamilton first began making videos back in 2012, utilising techniques from his background in architecture and animation. His love of electronic music and interest in natural and constructed environments results in videos that are a part of a synchronised musical and visual experience – recent works bridging the video-art/music-video divide include clips for Hudson Mohawke, Future Brown, and a collection of video and print output from long-term partnerships with Actress and Bok Bok.
Some of his other clients and collaborators include: PAN Records, Nightslugs, Werkdiscs, Kenzo, Sophie, Fade 2 Mind, Triangle Records, Warp Records, Kane Ikin, Kelela, James Hoff and Eddie Peake. At Sugar Mountain, expect a day-long wide spectrum of colour and texture that evolves throughout the entire day, which contrasts nature, technology and both natural and constructed environments.
His work has featured on Dazed and Confused, Fader, The Creators Projects, Rhizome, Channel 4 UK, and the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair. www.nichamilton.info/
Sibling
‘Squint Opera’ – SIBLING photo © Christine Francis
SIBLING work at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, cultural analysis and graphic communication to produce new and unexpected spatial outcomes. Whether the outcome be a building, installation, urban strategy or event, SIBLING’s approach insists on intelligent forms while fostering a positive socially engaged agenda.
For Sugar Mountain 2016, SIBLING are designing our Main Stage. Their piece will explore the geometries of nature and technology; where the individual comes together to create a whole, powerful mass.
SIBLING design spaces that aim to stimulate human interaction and connectedness. Recently completed works include the Gertrude Glasshouse gallery for Gertrude Contemporary; the offices for Squint/Opera; as well as the headquarters for Vice and i-D. Earlier this year SIBLING won the AIDA Emerging Designer award, as well as the Premier Design Award for their retail concept store, Dust.
SIBLING has participated in numerous exhibitions and events both in Australia and internationally; they were selected for the Artist in Residency Program at the Gyeonggi Creation Center in Seoul, South Korea; and were winners of the Open Agenda architectural research grant from Sydney’s University of Technology. www.siblingnation.net
Yahna Fookes x Martha Zakara: Intwo Pieces
Photo © Kurt Davies
Intwo Pieces is a visualisation of music executed through a contemporary dance and film installation. Driven by Sydney duo choreographer Yahna Fookes and film director Martha Zakarya, the work includes the sounds of techno producer Daze and talents of emerging dancer Kelsey Smith. An investigation of the retrieval of long-term memory, Intwo Pieces delves into our past and focuses on specific instances and experiences that have shaped the way in which we move.
Having worked and developed under the guidance with Australia’s renowned contemporary dance companies Chunky Move, Sue Healey and Tasdance, Sydney-based performer and choreographer Yahna Fookeshas worked across Australia, UK and New Zealand. Her 2011 dance film The Lift Goes Up screened as part of Melbourne’s State of Design Festival, later remounted at Poland’s Design Gallery BWA Wrocław. Yahna’s 2012 performance “Actions and Remains” was commissioned by the Auckland Art Gallery (in collaboration with visual artist Sriwhana Spong), while “Double Vision” was a residency at Melbourne’s Screen Space inalongside visual projection artist Thom Russell. Commissioned to choreograph swimwear label NLP’s runway show for Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, Yahna’s toured with the Sydney Dance Company (“2OneAnother”) and was a 2013 recipient of the City of Melbourne Arts Grant for her project “Suspended”, shown at Melbourne’s Rooftop Cinema.
Martha Zakarya is an emerging film director working independently and with Collider – a leading film and design collective based in Sydney. She is a multidisciplinary creative functioning between filmmaking, photography, and design across the areas of music, fashion and installation. Having graduated with honours in design from UTS in 2012, Martha’s worked amongst credible artists, designers and institutions – working independently with labels like Future Classic and Eleven Music, with leading stylist Mark Vassallo, Sydney favourite & local Incu Clothing & Mercedes Benz Fashion Week. During her time at Collider Martha has worked with an award-winning roster of directors: Daniel Askill, Andrew Van Der Westhuyzen, Ben Briand and Clemens Habicht, to name a few. She has exhibited as a photographer at Art & About Sydney (2013) and has shot cover art photography for Flume’s “Some Minds” single cover (2015). www.yahnafookes.com/
Prue Stent x Honey Long x Clare Longley
‘Silky Smooth’ , Prue Stent x Clare Longley x Honey Long
Prue Stent, Clare Longley and Honey Long are a local collaborative trio. Separately, their work spans across photography, sculpture, collage, drawing and painting, although often overlapping conceptually and aesthetically. Sugar Mountain 2016 will see them hatch an immersive and exhibition combining the sensual, the surreal, the sexual and the strange.
Prue Stent is a photographic artist currently based in Melbourne. Her work is a co-mingling of sculpture, installation, moving image and photography, through which she explores the relationship between feminism, fetishism and surrealism. Prue’s inspiration doesn’t derive from wanting to push a rational intellectual message or philosophical point of view, but instead from a perverse curiosity. Since graduating from a Bachelor of Art (Photography) at RMIT in 2014, Prue’s been involved in a short film and various collaborations with musicians, artists, fashion labels, magazines, including Oyster, i-D, Rush, Desktop and Vice. As an emerging artist she intends to continue on producing work in a collaborative team context, using photography in all sorts of ways, with all sort of purposes.
Clare Longley is an emerging artist based in Melbourne. Her mixed media practices span across painting, collage, drawing and photography. Though continually fluxing, Clare’s practice dances between beauty and disturbance. Evoking a timidity of touch and sense of foreplay, she finds pleasure in an ambiguous process, as she watches patterns emerge and arouses a sense of being human, making space for vulnerability amongst a haze of familiarities. Clare graduated from Victorian College of the Arts in 2014 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) and is continuing to develop and expand on her practice through various collaborations and commissions, as well as working towards a solo exhibition in February.
Honey Long is currently majoring in sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts. She has a highly diverse practice which spans across photography, installation, costume and sculpture as well as sustainability and design. A member of Sydney design collaborative Cave Urban, Honey’s worked on a number of their bamboo sculpture/ structures for events such as the Woodford Folk Festival and Art and About Sydney. Honey’s love for immersive spaces has also seen her carry out installations in collaboration with Prue Stent at Secret Garden festival for the past two years. Having a long standing practice together, some of their photographic collaborations have also been featured in a number of publications including Oyster and Viriditas, an anthology of female artists.www.pruestent.com/
Sugar Mountain
January 23, 2016
Sugar Mountain Tickets go on sale on Monday October 19, 2015.
Sensory Restaurant can be booked with your festival ticket for an additional $55 per person.
