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The Manly Arts Festival celebrates 22 years of creativity and allure.
The most inspiring and creative event on Sydney’s Northern Beaches cultural calendar, the annual Manly Arts Festival gets under way for 2015 from Friday 18 September to Sunday 27 September. Its official launch taking place at the Manly Art Gallery & Museum by actor Claudia Karvan, on Friday 18 September, 6-8pm.
Since its inception, the Manly Arts Festival has grown into one of the State’s leading community-based arts celebrations. It is the centrepiece to Manly Council’s exciting cultural program ‘Manly VIBE’ ‐ a celebration of all things Manly! Local arts and cultural organisations and Manly Council, supported by local businesses, combine forces to develop a creative and entertaining program of events, attracting over 15,000 visitors each year.
This year the Festival offers over 60 exciting, inclusive and energised family-friendly cultural events featuring prominent musicians, emerging visual artists and dance performers, films, talks and creative workshops in a host of different venues around Manly.
A highlight of the 2015 Festival will be Manly Art Gallery & Museum’s exhibition of the photomedia work of one of Australia’s most distinctive contemporary artists Anne Zahalka, with works from her acclaimed previous series focusing on the theme of the beach and new images created specifically for this exhibition. Anne’s work is characterised by explorations of national and personal identity, gender and culture.
“The new images focus on the beach district of Manly, its inhabitants and its distinctive environment, and will also draw from imagery within the Manly Art Gallery & Museum collection,” said festival coordinator and gallery senior curator, Katherine Roberts.
Manly Art Gallery & Museum will also host a provocative new multimedia installation by Northern Beaches‐based artist Jenny Pollak that raises the ultimate question about humanity’s fate on earth: ‘What will the world be like when humans no longer exist’?
A mixture of sculptural form, spoken word and projected video, Jenny Pollak’s ‘The Immortals’ is a multimedia installation that takes the viewer “into a kind of underwater archaeological dig” of an otherworldly, dreamlike scene “that reveals the remnants of what was once an entire civilization.”
Other Festival attractions include: an exhibition of rare ‘war quilts’ from the Annette Gero Collection; The Great Wall of Manly displaying mural work by photo-media artist Anna Zahalka; live painting sessions along Manly’s West esplanade; camera obscura created inside a 1950s caravan; zine fairs; 24/7 film festival; photography, and much more.
Manly Arts Festival
18 to 27 September, 2015
Sydney
Anne Zahalka, The New Bathers, 2013, type C print, 74 x 90cm
Courtesy the artist
