Golden Square
Our spiraling, sparkling Chinatown art car park. A concrete cavern of melting ice sculptures, a laser-eyed inflatable, kayak performance, cocktails and moon parades.
Golden Square is our swirling vortex of contemporary art from Australia and abroad—a concrete temple to big ideas.
Starting on the car park roof you’ll take in an iconic skyline lit up by building-sized projections. Grab a cocktail from Fancy Free’s pop-up bar—Melbourne’s impressively pedigreed travelling bar crew (The Black Pearl, Leonardo’s Pizza Palace)—before navigating new commissions from major Australian contemporary artists, including underfoot murals and melting columns of frozen lake water. You’ll then head down through the car park’s lower levels exhibiting video, performance and sculptural works.
In its first year, Golden Square’s curator Grace Herbert has used the theme Inland Tides to examine migration, colonisation, technology, consumerism and an environment in flux. Celestial bodies move aquatic swells, fresh water meets salt, minerals are deposited, and information exchanged. By the time you reach street level, the world’s going to look different.
Artists
Patty Chang, Invocation for a Wandering Lake, 2016
A dead beached whale and the hull of a ship are washed by the artist on the shores of Newfoundland. Invocation for a Wandering Lake is part of the hearts of the people are measured by the size of the land.
Rennie, driving a custom Holden Monaro, cruises the Western suburbs, performing burnouts as a form of contemporary Kamilaroi/Gamilaroi mark making to an operatic score composed by Deborah Cheetham AO.
Lu Yang, Power of will—final shooting, 2016
Digital self-portraiture caught in the flow, emerging inflated, glowing and new.
Parallel Park, Mission Surge, 2018
Piloting a land-bound kayak requires perfect timing and even pressure. An absurd, erotic marathon and durational performance moving through Golden Square.
Tabita Rezaire, DEEP DOWN TIDAL, 2017
Fibre-optic cables and sunken cities. Transoceanic networks and drowned bodies. Water as a conductive interface for communication.
Glowing, frozen blocks of lake water on Golden Square’s roof slowly melt; while marine microphones embedded within record the cracking ice as the melt leeches out of the carpark and into the city.
Mythical beasts, creatures of the night and spiritual beings march sporadically throughout the night in a parade of collective moon worship.
Agnieszka Polska, The New Sun, 2017
The sun sings a gospel—trolling you in the moments before extinction.
Monira Al Qadiri, The End, 2017
A hamburger levitates before your eyes. The most powerful food object in the industrialised world and a totem of US cultural expansion—floating precariously in space, ready to fall from grace.
Rox Lee (Roque Federizon Lee), Juan Gapang (Johnny Crawl), 1987
A figure crawls on the street of Manila in a film made a year after the Edsa Revolution—the revolution that ended the 20-year presidency of Ferdinand Marcos.
Juan Gapang (Johnny Crawl) is part of the hearts of the people are measured by the size of the land.
Curated by Grace Herbert
