There is a red chair that once existed in an adoption agency in Seoul between 1983-1991 that was sat on by every adoptee for their 'first photo'. This year, 36 years after the artist’s ‘red chair photo’ was taken, she contacted the agency to enquire about this red chair and if it might still be there. The social worker’s only response––‘The red chair in your picture does not exist’. In the potent slippage of translation, correspondence and negation, this exhibition is a performative affirmation that, ‘yes, it does!’
un/conscious is a large-scale artwork that features a collection of sixteen brightly coloured tactile canvases, creating a kaleidoscopic wall of colour. The textiles featured are recycled offcuts of vintage towels from Re/lax Remade, a sustainably focused, Sydney-based fashion label.
still waters run deep brings together the work of five artists who live or have lived on Wilyakali and Barkindji / Barkandji Country in Far West NSW: Barbara Quayle, Blake Griffiths, Dan Schulz, Tannya Quayle, and Verity Nunan.
Using remnants of the world that her Mum, Aunties, and Nan lived in, Jasmine Miikika Craciun celebrates the love, life and strength they embody. Like the beautiful coloured glass and crockery that has stood the test of time on the sandy flats of Wilcannia long after the humpies have gone, the matriarchs of her lineage do the same.
Prita Tina Yeganeh
My Soil Farsh فرش (Carpet) expresses the profound experience of placemaking through transforming and innovating a cultural object. For Prita Tina Yeganeh, the connection stems from the cultural values and rituals of kinship and community-building deeply embedded in the familial environment that nurtured her sense of belonging as a child.
Dr Virginia Keft
Guruwa gunya (gum tree home), is an immersive solo exhibition of new work by muruwari artist, Dr Virginia Keft. The exhibition invites audiences to an experiential and sensory encounter that blends concepts of Country and the natural world of the Australian bushland, with the domestic and urban space of ‘home’.
Magic Cave grew from research Emmaline Zanelli began in early 2023 into the social culture and family dynamics surrounding the mining industry in South Australia, with a focus on youth. Influenced by the young people she met and their interests, Magic Cave is an absurdist fantasy interpretation of life underground
Adele Warner and Gigi Malherbe
Cybermancy brings together Gigi Malherbe’s and Adele Warner’s meditations on the short-comings of the human body. As the suffix “mancy” denotes, artworks cast a speculative gaze to the near contemporary future to examine the integration of technology with the physicality and decay of the body.
Chetan Immidi, Ming Sun, Aarushi Zarthoshtimanesh, Sarah Ong and Aurelia King
dwelling / belonging brings together five emerging artists on unceded Gadigal land, with diverse Asian heritages and journeys to and from Australia. Each has experienced being a contemporary Australian, by choice or by birth, and holds tightly an engagement with their cultural and ethnic ancestry - explored, shared, processed, and learnt through their art practices.
Celine Cheung
Affection brings together artworks that explore ideas of obsession and objectification; fantasy and culpability; sentimentality and subjectivity. The suite of works sees to the artist inhabiting different roles as victim and violator, to invoke discussions of power, agency and gender dynamics.
Katrina Garvey and Lisa Kurtz
This project focuses on the ways deaf and hearing bodies can un/intentionally be gatekeepers, intermediaries or couriers in spaces. porous not only references the collaborative experiences between the artists, but also the way the audience connects those experiences.
Ali Tahayori
I will meet you there, came to realization by the contribution of over twenty friends, family members, artists and acquaintances. The project aims to reflect on the notion of "home" from a collective perspective.
Bonnie Huang
Learn how to do photo transfers onto homewares with Bonnie Huang and transform pre-loved ceramics with a collage of poetry and nostalgic clip-art images to give the unused objects new life.
emoeba h♡rtbridge
Knees, palms, forehead, bow down and kiss cool tiles. Like so many before and so many to come, humans find themselves present before shrines of many makings. Come craft a personal shrine with artist emoeba h♡rtbridge.
Kate Coyne
Join Kate Coyne and make your own interactive inflatables from upcycled materials like chip bags, recycled paper and paper straws! Create interactive, air-powered creations that explore sculpture and pop-ups. Animate a character, an abstract form or a weird sea creature!
Kate Coyne
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.
Ellen Dahl, Emma Pinsent, Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria
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; Sehej Kaur x Kaylee Rankin; emoeba h♡rtbridge; Bonnie Huang; Keesha Catherine Field
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.
Ali Noble
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.
Easton Dunne, Danica I. J. Knežević, Shannon Toth, Dustin Voggenreiter
Within the shared realms that we move through lies a concealed network of invisible architecture that charts separate paths and boundaries. Soft Cell brings together work by five artists from the 2023 Firstdraft program to navigate these nebulous and unclear borders and ambiguous social constructs.
Charles Levi
Luddite/Sodomite is a series of four textile and embroidery installations that investigate the immediate link between labour and textile through a queer lens.
Vedika Rampal
To be post-Partition, is simultaneously to be post-colonial. Yet the wounds of Empire still infiltrate and seep through folds of diasporic and intergenerational memory today.
Corey Black
You Won’t Believe The Snap In Your Throat examines the processes of digestion at the locus of industrial and post-industrial fabrication methods.
Amanda Bennetts
I feel the weight of the minute as I bend my body towards the clock is a multimedia installation examining time and the labour of self-care for the disabled and ill body.
Samantha Snedden
Join Sammi Snedden for free, all-ages weaving workshops on Saturday 16 December 2023 and Saturday 27 January 2022!
un Projects
Join un Projects on Saturday January 6th from 2-4pm for un Talks: RESIST/RETURN, an afternoon of readings by un Magazine Vol.17 contributors from Eora.
Shannon Toth
Food is a simple need for the body, eating is complex. Protector explores the sticky dynamics between food and self, and how these relations manifest as embodied experiences. Food can bring people together, soothe, comfort and celebrate, but it can also set the table for an inner battle.
Shahroud Ghahani
Remnants of a Dismantled State is a politically charged exhibition exploring the artist, Shahroud Ghahani’s experiences of exile, war and otherness through a feminist lens. Ghahani creates a portal into the memories of her past, a fragmentary connection to an imaginary homeland.
Curated by Samantha Snedden
The Enlightenment, curated by Samantha Snedden, seeks to disrupt conventional imaginings of weaving and woven work, specifically within the aesthetic scheme of the settler colony. A cheeky nod to the Age of Enlightenment, the exhibition reimagines what the emergence of new ideas can look like through a critical and playful use of First Nations weaving practices.
Olga Svyatova
So this is goodbye? explores ambiguous loss through the lens of the artist who lost their father in 2021 from Covid-19 in Russia. This highly personal and documentary exhibition draws on the photographic medium as one that simultaneously embodies both memory and loss.
Ozanam Learning Centre Artist Group
Over the last few months, the ceramicists and artists at the Ozanam Learning Centre have explored the idea of Above and Below and what this means to them through a group ceramic work and individual 2D works.
A new initiative that supports artists working across video, film, and screen-based practice.
The works consider two themes; what it means to live, love, work and play on the peripheries of societal centres and the place of mankind in the ecological disasters and extreme weather events that are ever-present.
Nqa + Antoinette
A collaboration between disciplines and perspectives on the fragile balance between support and precarity in their lives, combining the ceramic-based practice of Antoinette O'Brien (Lismore) with the multidisciplinary elements crafted by local artist Nqa Blayed.
Dustin Voggenreiter
Homo “Bozo” Sapiens Problemo is a series of digitally animated GIFs, displayed on large LCD screens, partially concealed by prison-cell window frames. The project explores the idea of our limited capacity to understand the world around us - As creatures born with sense organs geared towards survival, we grasp at making sense of the complex, chaotic reality we inhabit.
Teresa Busuttil
Asleep with the Fishes weaves together Teresa's memories, personal beliefs, and family history with elements of fantasy. Using repurposed materials, including a salvaged boat, she employs assemblage and sculptural techniques, drawing connections with religious iconography and deities, while exploring her own place in the Maltese diaspora.
Curated by Firstdraft
Western Sydney is many shades of human. Constantly evolving and in motion, it is a hub in a state of flux. Firstdraft brings together 11 creatives from Western Sydney to interrogate states of desire, faith and belonging in communities out west.
A new initiative that supports artists working across video, film, and screen-based practice.
The works consider two themes; what it means to live, love, work and play on the peripheries of societal centres and the place of mankind in the ecological disasters and extreme weather events that are ever-present.
Body says, No, by Danica I. J. Knežević, examines the complex association and dislocation of the medicalised body and the invisibility of care. The exhibition merges videos and images with mobility aids to draw attention to the medicalisation of the body.
Main Drag is a solo exhibition by Easton Dunne that explores queer experiences and identity work through an autobiographical lens within the context of rural and regional Central Queensland on Darumbal, Ghungalu and Wadja Country.
Threads explores the tangible and intangible connections, ties of friendship, shared practices and emerging collaborations–all which play a vital role in sustaining the community organisation Refugee Art Project.
Staging Portraits (2022 – ongoing) is a portrait series of the community at The Bearded Tit, a queer institution and bar in Redfern. Through photographs and written responses, it offers a glimpse into the ways queer people have redefined concepts of home and family, often out of necessity and survival.
Nick Breedon’s solo exhibition Public Art interrogates the function and possibilities of public art in queer/trans/crip futurity. Monumental sculptures in bronze, aluminium and concrete act as propositional public artworks, or works about the field and culture of public art.
Originally scheduled last July as an audience-led performance installation, it was instead brought into a digital space for 9 weeks due to extreme weather events. On a weekly basis, this open-access screenplay was uploaded chapter-by-chapter and edited anonymously by audiences from the comfort of their homes.
Act III: Love (or what if this is love?) embodies the inheritance and transference of knowledge through an ancestral plant that requires both community and family to nurture. Maissa Alameddine has been engaging with her overgrown and neglected areeshi (grapevine) since the first covid lockdown in 2020.
Wh0r3s 4eva is an exhibition of experimental art by sex workers and allies. Responding to the frequent erasure, censorship and deplatforming of sex workers, this exhibition celebrates the creativity, innovation and perseverance of sex workers who continue to make work both online and offline.
Conversion uses Hollywood melodrama, porn and “reality” or “documentary” aesthetics and stereotypes to draw on the inherently erotic, persuasive, and seductive nature of cinema and its capacity for conversion.
Year Without a Sun looks at the present through the lens of a historical climate crisis. In sculptural glass and film, the historical climate catastrophe caused by a bygone volcanic eruption is reanimated as an eye through which to view the environmental precarity of the present.
Within the context of imminent global catastrophe, speculation around plant consciousness and monstrous plants, as manifested in both philosophy and popular culture, is a site of productive tension concerning the vegetal, the more-than-human, and the future.
The Visible Invisible is an installation of expanded photography that uses black holes as a poetic device to explore identities shaped by adoption and diasporic existence, where not-knowing is an active lived-experience.
Join us from 2–4pm on Saturday 3 December for free artist talks with the artists and curators of our December–January exhibitions.
Join us from 6–8pm on Friday 2 December for the opening of four new exhibitions at Firstdraft.
Ngali Jugun Ganaree (Of Our Country) centres Indigenous relationships with Country that have been ongoing for all time.
I Cook A Lot Of All These Foods reflects on the home as a key space where the complexities of cultural negotiations exist, especially within a multi-racial household.
A(Di)pology explores how fatphobia and discrimination shape perceptions of our own and others' bodies.
FUTURE NOSTALGIA looks at emergent narratives of the future through our relationships to song, dance, craft, food, ecologies, ourselves and each other.
Countdown the last hours of the 2022 Firstdraft Auction at the Artists Party.
200+ artworks contributed by 175 artists from across Australia
The Firstdraft Auction is back online and on site!
Honey Trap Sound System brings together Sydney’s most powerful and relevant femme artists and musical collectives for the first time under one alleyway.
Join us from 11am–1pm on Saturday 10 September for free artist talks with the artists and curators of our September/October exhibitions.
Join us from 6–8pm on Friday 9 September for the opening of four new exhibitions at Firstdraft.
In Telesm, objects endemic to the urban landscape are reimagined as talismanic artefacts that promise protection and guidance within the urban landscape.
Just Guzzling imagines how images and ideas are inherited, metabolised and manifest as logics that are difficult to outmanoeuvre.
댄싱머신: Dancing machine came to birth parallel to EJ Son’s fascination with the story of the artist-king Pygmalion of Cyprus and his sculptural waifu of Galatea.
so hot right now now now is a thematically ambivalent reflection on the millenarian consequences of catastrophic climate change impacting Australia now.
Six diverse, interdisciplinary artists unified by a shared interest in grappling with issues of space as it relates to agency, care, community, liberation, reclamation, perception, and disconnection – as well as our prescribed and unprescribed understanding of what it means to “access” space.
Red Inc. is both an exhibition and collective, featuring the work of eight East-Asian Australian artists – Casey Chen, Chris Chew, Rosemary Lee, Tya Tey, Yu Xin Jia, Morus Quin, Alicia Zhao, and Richard Chaohsi Wu – whose practices imagine what emerges from diversely hybridised cultural experiences.
All that heaven allows is an audience-led performance installation that allows for multiple (dis)embodiments of the archetypal roles within the genre of horror.
Yvette James’s practice expresses the anthropomorphic qualities of our personal data. Through haptic solidity of steel and aluminium, Uncovering the Flesh in Our Satellites translates coded processes into a visceral, abject reality.
In The Enchanting Microplastics, Visaya Hoffie utilises 'plastic' as a signifier for popular culture – deploying a wealth of imagery, media and techniques to convey the way we ingest and regurgitate culture in contemporary life.
sister +++++ familial formations looks at the act of collecting, capturing, constructing, charting, ordering, relocating and deconstructing a family.
Shoe Bathers conjures the deeply intimate and timeless relationship of the body’s sensory reception to the spirit, natural elements and kinship.
Matthew is an artist with a mental illness and a disability, and he believes he was destined to be an artist – with or without disability.
Temples of Doom is a moving image work that engages the issue of endangered pagoda rock formations and sacred First Nations rock-art sites in the recently announced Gardens of Stone State Conservation area of the Greater Blue Mountains.
A night of live artworks, performances and installations, co-developed by Firstdraft and Arab Theatre Studio in partnership with Art Month Sydney.
This one goes out to the one(s) I love is a series of quilted and hand-embroidered masks, each acting as a memento/keepsake of a person, or group of people, important to the artist.
Do we prepare for the future or let events occur in the absence of obvious intention or cause?
Georgia Morgan’s new exhibition By Proximity is an exercise in making tangible the unseen or out of reach.
I want to be made out of love, I want to be made into life is a meditation on the longing for place, community and love.
An international commissioning project supported by the Keir Foundation, co-developed by Firstdraft and Beirut Art Center.
Haunting In Kensington hints at the magic-in-the-messiness of queer kin-fields and deep-seeded fag geographies.
Circling the Sun examines the diverse techniques utilised by artists to capture and visualise the sun.
Lesser palace explores ideas of ‘oceanic feeling’, and imagines ways of being in the world that rely less on notions of discrete selfhood, and more on porosity, kinship, and affective encounter.
For the month of December, interdisciplinary artist, writer and community organiser Julia Bavyka will be in-residence at Firstdraft developing new episodic dream-texts.
Soft Power is an online exhibition featuring a suite of new commissions by eight artists and writers, each exploring what is obscured and nullified in emergent and established systems of power.
Our annual fundraiser is a time to come together and celebrate artists supporting artists.
Traversed Differences is an exhibition that explores the way we can express and represent identity, spirituality, otherness.
Edwina Green’s exhibition to make a basket speaks about the connectivity of language through the practice of basket making.
Sometimes when I feel empty, I eat a second breakfast. is a sculptural response to the everyday.
‘Enua Mānea is an immersive interactive installation that reflects on the environmental and cultural impacts of climate change within the Pacific Islands today.
In residence at Firstdraft throughout May, Sonya Holowell and James Hazel’s Danger/Dancer began as an artistic inquiry into geocultural sites in Australia holding fraught pasts, presents and futures.
Embracing the flip-the-table energy of the new year, be engulfed by loud, saucy and uninhibited artworks in a night of hedonism and surprise.
A call to rise extends conversations around the ways in which bread, and its various processes and forms, has the potential to disrupt, relate, differentiate, produce, sustain and gather bodies
The Perceiving of Sound is an immersive sound installation where audiences partake in their own personal experience of perceiving sound.
This exhibition attempts to reclaim a sanctified space and challenge antiquated notions of purity and pollution.
Five new commissions by Tom Blake, Jazz Money, Amy Claire Mills, Athena Thebus and Leo Tsao, presented at Carriageworks.
Archaeology of Memory tells the stories of refugees and asylum seekers, suspended between conflict and political rhetoric.
Virtual works and prints exploring figures that hatch in speculative futures. The series is informed by the natural systems and projections of tomorrow.
A text-based textile installation highlighting society’s attitudes towards and the absurdities of our need to save, change or fix disabled people.
An installation of paintings that convey the artist’s experience of involuntary seclusion.
For NAIDOC Week 2020, Firstdraft has commissioned 8 First Peoples TikTok creators to present new video content online.
Corporeal/Spiritual considers concepts of materiality, unacknowledged histories, experiences of the body beyond death, and renewal.
An exhibition that explores how normative understandings of gender are performed, controlled, and organised within fashion retail spaces.
An installation that focuses on connecting the limits within and between material experimentation and performativity.
Linguistic Prosperity aims to reclaim the agency and authority over the listing of our words, reasserting dominance in a space which was always ours.
A glistening shipwreck rests in a darkened gallery: a monument to the past and spectre of our future.
Argileh at Wedding Cake Rock features a series of tableaux constructed from surreal appropriations of Western Sydney neighbourhoods and social montages.
In Their Finery explores the familial performance of inherited traditions, the temptation of embodying your own exotic, and the politicisation of the chickpea.
For the first time in its 11-year history, the Firstdraft Auction will be hosted entirely online. Our annual fundraiser is a time to come together (virtually) and celebrate artists supporting artists.
An online exhibition centring emerging and established artists and writers whose practices challenge the colonial state of Australia.
Curated by Katie Winten
After hitting the streets of Kings Cross and Wolloomooloo, join us at Firstdraft where we’ll be partying into the night.
To celebrate Firstdraft's 10th fundraising auction we're doing something a little bit different.
Curated by astute art investments international (AAII)
with Kieron Broadhurst, Michelle Proksell 媚潇 & Gabriele de Seta, Song Xi 宋兮 & Yang Xinjia 杨欣嘉, Giselle Stanborough and Ying Miao苗颖
Curated by Liquid Architecture - Joel Stern, Danni Zuvela and Kusum Normoyle
