Every year, the Power Institute engages with and presents leading ideas in art and visual culture from Australia and around the world, through publications, collaborative research, and a vibrant program of talks, symposia and conferences. Alongside Power’s curated series and initiatives, however, is a dedication to partnering with Australia’s broader art history and artistic community. These efforts are framed under an initiative we’re calling ‘Powered by Power’, or P×P for short.
The initiative will extend the Foundation’s support towards ideas and projects being developed by a range of individuals and institutions across Australia, from new, university museums-led publications focused on Australian artists, to city-based festivals and the public presentation of new research. And our support comes in different forms: from financial grants, advice and administrative assistance, as well as help with distribution and communications.
With P×P, we aim to give an electric spark of support to important work already going on in Australia, and to illuminate such work within our broader global network of scholars, artists, and curators.
So, do you have a community project that’s partially funded and need an extra boost?
A publication on an Australian artist that deserves a wider audience?
Or maybe you need support to get an event off the ground?
Pitch us your project, and we’ll see what we can do to amp it up.
How do I make the pitch?
Email us at powerinstitute@sydney.edu.au with a brief outline of your project, and what sort of support you’re seeking.
We consider pitches on a rolling basis, so feel free to get in touch with us beforehand to work out if your project is the sort of thing we could help with.
Past projects
Our first P×P project is a co-publication with Monash University Museum of Art titled Dale Harding: Through a Lens of Visitation, focusing on the artist’s relationship to his mother’s Country, Carnarvon Gorge.
As an iconic landscape once painted by similarly iconic figures of Australian art—Margaret Preston and Sidney Nolan—the publication questions these ‘visitor’ interpretations and their connection to Indigenous modernisms. A descendant of the Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal peoples of central Queensland, Dale Harding often addresses the complex and often painful histories of discrimination enacted against Aboriginal communities in his practice. Here he pays homage to matrilineal female figures in his family. As he considers transience and personal connections to place, he sets his work alongside a major textile commission by his mother, Kate Harding.