Innovators Program

The Innovators Program is dedicated to artists presenting new work. It is a dynamic series of exhibitions that support artists by creating opportunities for them to present innovative and uncompromising art in a professional, nurturing and accessible environment.

The Program provides artists, chosen through an application and selection process, with exhibition space as well as technical, marketing and curatorial support. Proposals are assessed against Linden's programming objectives and exhibition selection criteria. Currently there are 4 Innovators exhibitions scheduled as part of our Innovators program.

Melbourne Airport has been a supporter of the Innovators Program since 2005 and in 2007 further added to this support by introducing the Melbourne Airport Innovators Award.

Application Forms

Will be posted here as a PDF download when they become available.

Melbourne Airport Innovators Award

Linden actively engages with young and emerging artists and Melbourne Airport continues to support these artists through the Innovators Program and the Melbourne Airport Innovators Award which is part of the Melbourne Airport Emerging Talent Program.

In 2008 Linden will award an artist or curator of the 2007 Innovators Program with the Melbourne Airport Innovators Award - an opportunity to travel overseas to a major visual arts event.

The Melbourne Airport Emerging Talent Program is an initiative to support young and emerging Victorian talent in a wide range of performing and visual arts. It invests in Victoria's cultural future by supporting arts organisations that nurture developing talent, and by providing prize money for the selected young talent to travel overseas.

Link: http://www.melbourneairport.com.au/emergingtalent/

Simon Obarzanek won the second Melbourne Airport Innovators Award for his exhibition Men of Passion which formed part of Innovators 1, 2007. The prize was a trip to the 2008 Shanghai Biennale.

Letters from Shanghai - Simon Obarzanek

In my first hour in Shanghai I bought a watch from a man on the street because I didn't bring my mobile and had no way of telling the time. The watch stopped a few minutes later and I negotiated hard for another watch further down the road. This second watch also stopped and then came apart in my hands as I showed it off to my friend Ross. We both laughed at the comic timing of the watch. It was a real pro. Finally one of the street vendors gave me a free watch in exchange for the two broken ones and it worked for the rest of my stay in Shanghai. Although the band fell off immediately and I had to keep it in my pocket.

This unrehearsed performance between me and the street vendors was like an initiation into Chinese process-based art. There were several quite tough works that stood out to me in the public and private galleries. (I didn't write down any names of the artists and my memory can't be relied upon).

One man who I am sure is very well known picked up a rock on the shores of an English beach and walked around the country with it.

Another artist documented the harsh life of dogs in a small poor community at the top end of China. The dogs were starving, fighting with each other for a meager scrap that had been fought over by many dogs before and had nothing left on it at all. The dog's narrow frames swayed in the strong winds and the bitter cold. The old and the sick were killed and used as sustenance for the living. All this was shown on four large projection screens in a grainy black and white film stock. I had to stay watching for an hour since it was pouring rain outside. Leaving was not an option.

One last work stayed in my cloudy memory. It was a series of photographs documenting line drawing made with a brush and water in the artist's home and also outdoors in exposed areas where the drawings would have evaporated quickly. This made me think of how much of this persons work had probably not been documented. The quiet life and work of this artist seemed to be in battle with the structures needed to document it. The two were so different, but one needed the other.

 

 

 

image: Colin Duncan
Colin Duncan, Lolly Pop Forest Installation 2007 from Strange Beauty


image: Simon Obarzanek