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Firstdraft is where the future of contemporary art emerges, through a program that is critical, ambitious and experimental.
our program callout is now open!
Closes 10 May 2024 11:59PM
Firstdraft supports and platforms early-career, risk-taking and experimental art practices through a diverse program of solo and group exhibitions.
Closes 10 May 2024 11:59PM
Our curator program is designed to support curator-driven projects, placing a special emphasis on projects where the curator is not also an exhibiting artist.
Open all year round
The First Peoples Curators Program supports early career Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander curators with new skills, professional presentation and development opportunities, and access to key industry networks.
Open all year round
Firstdraft’s Live Program engages our community and enlivens our spaces through innovative and transformative live experiences.
what’s on
What ideologies are subverted when curtains assert versatility, sensuality and movement in spaces typically defined by fixedness? Cubbyhouse (Nothing is Certain, said the Curtain) merges the familiarity of Ali Noble’s existing textile-based practise, with the exploration of a new format, video.
Firstdraft’s pop-up classroom, Class S2, calls for you to tap into your child-like self with the materials, knowledge and memories collected and experienced by who you are today, making objects in experimental and hopeful ways.
In Unruly Edges, Ellen Dahl, Emma Pinsent and Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria have collaborated to create an imagined ecotone or contact zone, formed as the boundaries of their works dissolve and entangle, initiating new dialogues between their works in order to draw out previously unexplored or emergent ideas in their practices.
Kate Coyne's studio practice explores how experience can be embodied and the nature of the relationship between the body/experience and materiality in a socio-political feminist context. Temporality, the progression of past, present and future is inherent, with materials discolouring over time and gravity taking over form and identity in the same way that it does with an ageing, sagging body.
news
We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Caity Reynolds as Firstdraft's new General Manager.
Firstdraft is now seeking proposals from artists, curators and writers for consideration in our 2023–24 Program. We invite ideas that champion experimentation, risk and inclusion.
We are delighted to announce the 2023–24 Firstdraft Board of Directors: Kym Elphinstone, James Little, Geirthana Nandakumaran, Monica Rani Rudhar, Michelle Wang, and Olivia Welch.
interviews
“These spaces of imaginative and creative wildness are rare in a world that wants to compartmentalise and control all forms of cultural production.”
“We all have our own experiences of moving toward or away from connection, and for me, part of navigating these experiences necessarily involves a questioning of where I begin and end, what or who I consist of, and how the impacts of mutuality and difference influence how I move through the world.”
“I’m working mostly within the scope of documentary and experimental eco-cinema practices, utilising the principles of slow cinema and cinéma vérité.”
“The sun's pervasive presence allows it to be the subject, whether direct or not, for a lot of artistic practices and creative investigations.”
The Firstdraft Census is Firstdraft’s annual stakeholder survey for 2024. Firstdraft is growing and we want to hear from you during this period of change.