Our 2025 Curatorial Theme – ‘Re:Place’

OpenField is a contemporary arts festival offering a distinct and diverse cultural encounter in the south coast town of Berry. 

Gathering local, regional and visiting artists, OpenField aims to engage, cooperate and promote exchange within the community by promoting fresh viewpoints across a range of works which converge within the evolving identity of the town. 

In agricultural terms, ‘open field’ refers to the clearing of wilderness to create arable/pastoral land. Artistically, OpenField can exist as a place beyond accepted structures - offering possibilities of interactive, collaborative, hybrid, cross-form, experimental work and allowing for non-restrictive approaches to how art can be made, presented and experienced. 

Thematically artists and curators are invited to respond to ideas of place, geography, movement, displacement, colonisation, transplanting or loss of culture, assimilation, immersion, disruption and procession. What it is to belong, to stay, to vacate, to leave, to relocate, to roam, to return, to be in exile - how we exist in places through our differing perspectives of experience, time and connection/disconnection. 

OpenField acknowledges that we live and work on stolen land and we pay our respect to the Traditional Custodians, Ancestors, Elders and communities of the Dharawal and Dhurga Aboriginal language groups. The festival supports and invites First Nation perspectives and subscribes to truth telling, recognition and regeneration, especially stories from traditional custodians.