This year marks the 50th anniversary of Kaldor Public Art Projects, John Kaldor's ambitious organisation specialising in site-specific and frequently large-scale public artworks by mostly international artists.
It kicked off in 1969 with Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 'Wrapped Coast', which featured 95,000 square metres of fabric, wrapping two kilometres of coastline in Little Bay. Since then, the participating artists have included Gilbert & George, Jeff Koons, Michael Landy and Marina Abramović.
This year's project, the 34th in the series, will be headed up by Asad Raza, a New York-based artist who specialises in live art experiences. His previous works include 'Untitled (plot for dialogue)', where he installed a game of tennis in a deconsecrated Milan church, and 'Root sequence. Mother tongue', which featured 26 living trees and caretakers installed inside the Whitney Museum in New York. One of his most famous pieces was 'home show', in which he allowed 30 artists to change his New York home and impose rituals upon him, and invited visitors on a tour of his home every day for five weeks.
Details are still scant about his Sydney project, but Raza is collaborating with biologists and environmental scientists to transform the Clothing Store building on the Carriageworks site. There'll be organic elements (plants, perhaps?) inside the building, and a variety of scenes and participants who you can interact and speak with.
He says that he thinks of himself as a producer and that there are three main groups of protagonists in this art project: the first are the scientists, the second are an as-yet-unnamed group of Australian artists, and the third are the "cultivators", who are a group of people from Sydney who'll work with the project.
If you think that sounds frustratingly vague, we agree. Perhaps Raza is trying to keep his secrets under wraps. Or perhaps it's still very much a work in progress.
What we do know is that the work will be presented free to the public from May 3 to 19. We're sure more details will become available in the coming months. Watch this space.
Check out our hitlist of the best public art in Sydney and the best exhibitions this month.