Rodney Currie Stars in a Movie by Nicholas Currie (Mununjali, Kuku Yalanji) is the inaugural project for Soft Infrastructures – Next Wave’s commissioning series supporting socially engaged and community-led artistic practice.
Combining moving image, archival materials and performance, Rodney Currie Stars in a Movie by Nicholas Currie explores family, memory and Indigenous self-representation through the intertwined histories of cinema, family mythology and autobiography.
Working with his father, Rodney Currie – an artist, community member and former cinema projectionist – Nicholas Currie brings together portraits, conversations and staged moments drawn from family stories and Australian cinema history. Reclaiming the camera and screen as tools of Indigenous authorship, Nicholas Currie takes up the role of narrator, exploring how stories are inherited, retold and reshaped.
Part family portrait, part cinematic experiment, the work brings personal histories into conversation with collective memory, blurring the boundaries between lived experience and performance. Through this intimate collaboration, Currie considers how the stories we inherit shape our understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.
Nicholas Currie is a Mununjali and Kuku Yalanji artist working across painting, sculpture, moving image and performance. Grounded in autobiographical inquiry, his practice explores identity, masculinity, memory and Indigenous self-representation in contemporary Australia. His practice explores contemporary Indigenous perspectives, identity, masculinity and memory, moving between humour and criticality. His paintings have been described as “playful and cheeky” by Lowbrow in its review of ACCA’s NEW26.
About Soft Infrastructures
Soft Infrastructures is Next Wave’s new commissioning series dedicated to social practice and community-led methodologies, supporting an early-career Victorian artist to create a career-defining work that reflects the evolving role of art in public life.
Soft Infrastructures invites artists to reimagine collective, place-based and relational ways of art making for the future. It provides one early-career artist each year with the resources, mentorship and institutional backing necessary to develop an ambitious new work that meaningfully engages public life and civic space.
Focusing on deep collaboration with local communities, this program creates space for connection, learning, and belonging. It invites participation from artists and non-artists alike, and embraces collaboration with humans and more-than-human kin.
Opening Wednesday 11 November, 5.30pm
RSVP
Public Program, Friday 13 November, 6.30pm
Artist talk + special screening of Jaws (1975), accompanied by commentary from Rodney Currie.
Tickets from $5 / free for First Nations communities
Screening continues until Saturday 21 November
Wednesday – Saturday, 11am – 4pm
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Next Wave
Next Wave is a leading not-for-profit arts organisation dedicated to supporting early-career artists working across multiple art forms. Next Wave plays a defining role in the Australian arts landscape by empowering and advocating for early-career and experimental artistic practice in Australia.
270 Sydney Road, Bulleke-bek (Brunswick)
nextwave.org.au
Accessibility
Brunswick Mechanics Institute is a step-free venue with accessible bathrooms.
Video tour of Brunswick Mechanics Institute
Download the Brunswick Mechanics Institute visual story (.docx)
Download the Brunswick Mechanics Institute visual story (.pdf)
Download the Brunswick Mechanics Institute transport and parking information (.docx)
Download the Brunswick Mechanics Institute transport and parking information (.pdf)
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