Cementa is an artist-led organisation based in Kandos, New South Wales, dedicated to cultivating contemporary art in a regional context. An annual program of residencies and special projects form the biennial Cementa Festival, in 2022, brings together over sixty regional and urban artists for a four-day celebration of Australian contemporary art across the spectrums of generation, process, and practice, from 19 to 22 May 2022.
Courtesy Cementa Inc., New South Wales
The heart of Cementa22 is the Artists’ Program, with more than forty artists making, exhibiting, and performing work: video, installation, sound, performance and two- and three-dimensional artworks in twenty venues and locations across the small town and its surrounds. Find poems generated on the streets of Kandos, witness stories of death in shop windows, and at the local museum, the ghosts of women who lived in the margins of the town’s history are remembered. While Djon Mundine and Dabee descendants embellish the mural testifying to the Aboriginal heritage of the country. The installations, performances and public programs of Carnival Catastrophe create a post-disaster emotional landscape to explore ideas of uncertainty, of trying to find comfort, shelter, or a safer place, and trying to understand what happened. It provides a catalyst for conversations where voices in these communities can share their experiences. The Longest Hum by Tina Stephanou invites participation to create the longest and largest humming event in a regional location; to combine our voices in a single tenuous expression that extends across the town and into the distances of our social being.
