Artist to Artist

Sydney — Wednesday 6 November 2024

The Sydney Opera House today announced Artist to Artist, an experimental series of thoughtful conversations between local and international contemporary artists offering fresh perspectives on global cultures. Hosted in the intimacy of the Utzon Room, four sessions held across 2024 and 2025 will be led by interdisciplinary artists from diverse backgrounds and career stages who work with language, objects, sound, poetics and design.

The inaugural Artist to Artist in-conversation series will feature multidisciplinary poet and filmmaker JulianKnxx in conversation with multimedia artist Samoan-Australian Angela Tiatia, American-El Salvadorian sound artist Guadalupe Maravilla alongside Australian-Vietnamese multi-disciplinary artist James Nguyen, acclaimed European industrial designers Englishman Max Lamb and Italian Martino Gamper OBE, and the celebrated Quandamooka artist Megan Cope with Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné composer and artist Raven Chacon.

Sydney Opera House Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Micheal Do: “Artist to Artist knits together artists from around the world who create, communicate, connect ideas, cultures and mediums in the deepest, most thoughtful of ways. They are invited on the basis that they each bring something new into our world; new ways to see, hear, feel, imagine and understand colours, sounds, textures, emotions and politics. Each artist has brought about cultural rupture – attending to our most pressing socio-political-cultural questions. Despite their varied methods and mediums, they are connected by their collective desire to complicate our understandings of the world. They ask us to lift the moral floor, to stay clear eyed and alert, and most importantly, to confront, head on, the rapidly shifting world we live in today. It gives me great pleasure to bring these artists to Sydney, a city that hungers for the global, the grand and the great.”

Each session will pair one artist who has exhibited at the Opera House with an international practitioner whose work echoes similar themes, and delve into topics ranging from the healing capacity of music, experimental design thinking, the loss of Indigenous knowledge, and art for healing, resistance and solidarity. These unique exchanges will contest the traditional format of an artist talk, incorporating performance elements and innovative approaches like sound baths, storytelling and live readings, ensuring that no two conversations are the same.