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, Open Field aims to engage, cooperate and promote exchange within the community by promoting fresh viewpoints across a range of works which coalesce or disrupt 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, 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. The festival supports and invites First Nation perspectives and subscribes to truth telling, especially the stories of the traditional custodians of our local country, the Wodi Wodi and Jerrinja peoples.