Roslyn Helper

Welcome to the 16th guest blog post of Time Out Sydney's 52 Weeks of #SydCulture 2017 challenge! April's culture selector is Roslyn Helper: director of Underbelly Arts Festival, artist (solo and as part of Zin), and former artistic director of Electrofringe. Every Wednesday of April, Roslyn will be telling us what she loved the week before. Think of it as your recommendations for this week, from someone who sees a helluva lot of arts and culture. Over to her. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the word ‘displacement’ and recent works by young Australian artists that deal with the incongruences between our learned and felt identities. Displacement is felt on one hand by generations of Australians with migrant backgrounds who have struggled to define a certain Australian-ness not represented in news and cultural programs. But displacement is also felt in Australia in the incessant corporatisation and commercialisation of culture more broadly. Cultural products, ideas and actions are displaced from their root source, appropriated and spoon fed to us in the forms of mainstream fashion, design and advertising. This week I went to Firstdraft to check out artist JD Reforma’s exhibition Coconut Republic, an exhibition that – as the room sheet explains – “explores how American corporate ideology has colonised our modern field of vision”.   JD Reforma – Coconut Republic, 2017, installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photograph: Zan Wimberley / courtesy the artist and Firstdraft  

Welcome to the 15th guest blog post of Time Out Sydney's 52 Weeks of #SydCulture 2017 challenge! April's culture selector is Roslyn Helper: director of Underbelly Arts Festival, artist (solo and as part of Zin), and former artistic director of Electrofringe. Every Wednesday of April, Roslyn will be telling us what she loved the week before. Think of it as your recommendations for this week, from someone who sees a helluva lot of arts and culture. Over to her. This week a friend posted on Facebook: “Sydney needs less Pop Ups and more STAY UPs”. The statement received hundreds of likes and dozens of comments. Sydney is a city where the lifespan of your favourite restaurant could be three months, where rental accommodation can feel like a perpetual AirBnB pop up, and where many independent art spaces have to close their doors within a year or two of opening, due to red tape, high rental prices or neighbour complaints. It is, as one commenter quipped, “the city that always sleeps… kind of the opposite of New York”. Pop up culture definitely plays an important role in maintaining the vibrancy and excitement of inner-city life, but conversely, the effects of a culture that champions transience, impermanence and instability can take its toll on individuals and communities trying to establish meaningful, lasting connection. Enter Down / Under, the new independent space for art located underneath Freda’s in Chippendale. The space has recently been transformed from a leaky, dusty under

Welcome to the 14th guest blog post of Time Out Sydney's 52 Weeks of #SydCulture 2017 challenge! April's culture selector is Roslyn Helper: director of Underbelly Arts Festival, artist (solo and as part of Zin), and former artistic director of Electrofringe. Every Wednesday of April, Roslyn will be telling us what she loved the week before. Think of it as your recommendations for this week, from someone who sees a helluva lot of arts and culture. Over to her. Every once in a while, Darlinghurst’s National Art School extends its hours for a night of art after dark: NAS Nights. Last Thursday was one of those rare opportunities to see the school in a different light, with the Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize on show, a market for NAS students to sell their art at, and a program of performances curated by artist collective Barbara Cleveland featuring Get to Work, Eugene Choi, Knitted Abyss and Giselle Stanborough. I got there for Giselle Stanborough – The Artist as a Real Housewife with Special Guest Athena X. Athena X Levendi is a larger-than-life painter-cum-reality TV star. During her stint on the first season of The Real Housewives of Sydney, she established a reputation for her bold fashion statements and whacky one-liners. The self-professed ‘spiritual goddess’ is a force to be reckoned with, and all was on show this evening, as she revealed how she had felt during the series (totally out of place, disliked by her fellow housewives, and shunned for her originality, but al

Welcome to the 13th guest blog post of Time Out Sydney's 52 Weeks of #SydCulture 2017 challenge! April's culture selector is Roslyn Helper: director of Underbelly Arts Festival, artist (solo and as part of Zin), and former artistic director of Electrofringe. Every Wednesday of April, Roslyn will be telling us what she loved the week before. Think of it as your recommendations for this week, from someone who sees a helluva lot of arts and culture. Over to her. Last Sunday afternoon I attended Desire Lines, the third and final of a series of Sunday afternoon Ultimo ‘art walks’ curated by Maeve Parker and Sebastian Henry-Jones. As they have so beautifully described, “To travel along a Desire Line is to engender an alternate direction of behaviour or thought. Desire Lines traverse both physical and cognitive space, and so to step differently is also to think in new ways. A Desire Line is the hole in the fence, the absent-minded turn, the shortcut home.” It started with a shy group, a combination of 20-something art hipsters ironically wearing sports caps, socks and sandals, and parent-aged inner-westies rocking cargo shorts, gathered on a eucalyptus-scented Ultimo street corner under the collective but unspoken assumption that we were all there for the same reason. We got our names marked off a roll by a friendly guide named Joel, who gave each person a fortune cookie (“Life is not a mystery to be solved, but a reality to be experienced”) and then conducted an acknowledgement of