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From 15 to 24 September, Sydney Design Week 2023 presents a city-wide program of more than sixty events, including exhibitions, screenings, panels, tours, workshops, a materials market, and public architecture responding to widespread cultural and environmental change.
Titled Amodern, this year’s program explores the complex and interconnected social and natural ecologies in which contemporary design operates. Highlights include panel discussions and intensive workshops exploring the innovation and beauty of contemporary modest fashion at the intersection of contemporary design, cultural identity and sustainability. Plus guided walks, talks, and site-specific performances interrogate the relationships between architecture, communities, and equitable environments.
Brodie Neill,, Jetsam table made of ocean plastic aggregate and bio-resin. Photograph: Angela Moore
Catch the keynote by South Korean designer Kwangho Lee on Saturday 16 September, 2–3pm, for insight into his knotted nylon cord furniture and enamelled copper created using ancient Korean firing techniques learnt from his childhood in rural South Korea, growing up on a farm outside Seoul: observing his grandparents using natural materials to make tools and everyday objects fostered his interest in making things with his hands.
Meanwhile, on Sunday 24 September, 2–3pm, Ocean Terrazzo takes us into the deep entangled world of plastics in of need radical rethinking. A panel of experts in science, Indigenous knowledge, cultural studies and design will discuss the ecological and social concerns of this issue and explore why solutions to the plastic problem need to be multidimensional.
Renee So, Opium by Yves Saint Laurent, 2022
The program is joined by a wealth of exhibitions, including Objects Testify, a community-engaged program exploring the colonial legacies of Australia’s built environment and its ongoing impact on First Nations communities, led by Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist Joel Sherwood Spring at UTS Gallery. Parlour Parlëur a new project by the ArtHitects (Gary Carsley and Renjie Teoh) at Penrith Regional Gallery, transforming the Main Gallery with thousands of overlapping A4 photocopies drawn from the Gallery’s collection of art, furniture and the gardens. And at UNSW Galleries, Provenance is Renee So’s first major exhibition in Australia delving into her embrace of traditional crafts, cross-cultural thinking, an underlying sense of the comedic, and a persistent feminist worldview.
“I hope that in the year 2122 the art/craft divide no longer exists, and that we live in a peaceful, tolerant, egalitarian society with climate change no longer a threat to our survival. I’d like the visitor to be surprised that my work is 100 years old, either because they thought it was much older or more recent.” – Renee So.
