Festivals Past

Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2022 grounds in unapologetic, intimate and sensitive displays of care grounding itself in conversations and storytelling. {A Soft Pulse} lands and brings together our artists, collaborators and partners to celebrate and explore our relationship with ourselves as the grounding for relationships with others. Featuring new work from a diverse range of practitioners, these public activations work towards engaging the audience into the private worlds of the selected artists. This year’s projections will be accessible from Gertrude street and surround, inviting audiences to consider the moments presented by the selected artists.

Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2021 hits fast forward to 500 years from here, asking artists for speculative visions far beyond the now and considers the importance of constructs such as colour, race, gender, sexuality, age, ability, class and nationality. People and our environments are the impetus for project responses. How are they manifested in your future? What have you managed to take with you and what have you left behind in this new utopia? Or has it all gone to hell and you want to warn us all of Skynet!?

Through themes of desire, disruption and subversion, Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2019 explored and negotiated the notion of resistance within our changing social, environmental, political and urban landscapes. Including a series of participatory projections, video games, and virtual reality works, artists pushed the art form of projection into new realms, while questioning constricting structures, pushing back against the status quo, and giving strength to fluid identities.

Gertrude Street Projection Festival brought together a mini but ambitious nocturnal playground of interactive installations and projection art. Lighting up the Atherton Gardens, this year featured a range of immersive kaleidoscopic projections that highlighted the public housing estate and responded to audience participation. The wider community was invited to play with and observe the bouncing colours to help reduce the stigma around public housing.

The 10th Anniversary of GSPF invited artists to create visions of the future, turning Gertrude Street into an epoch that explored multiple universes of social, political, and environmental differences. Ambitious light works drew inspiration from the past and present to project immersive, interactive, and enchanting experiences of limitless futures.

In 2016 Gertrude street was transformed through projection and installations to create an emotional landscape that formed a visual union between place, space, and spirituality. Forging a connection between artwork and audience, each artist orchestrated experiences that explored the physical, social, conceptual, and metaphysical space that we inhabit in our daily lives.

In the GSPF 8th festival, artists were challenged to create works that pushed the boundaries of projection art. The resulting festival contained vibrant innovative visuals that were site-specific to buildings along Gertrude Street, enlivening the streetscape and invigorating the community to think differently.

Artists were called upon to explore the state of transitoriness and took on both abstract and literal interpretations of transience. As projection and installation already exist in a state of temporality, artists used their work to provide memorable participatory installations and striking visuals for the public.

Bold colours and playful projections set Gertrude Street alight for patrons to see familiar buildings and spaces in new inspiring ways. ILLUMINATE provoked artists to explore vivid imagery, unusual patterns and highlight obscure architecture that patrons could explore through observation and participation.

What are the elements that make us? Artists were challenged to look beyond the basic elements of earth, wind, water, and fire to explore complex elements that shape our environment and humanity. Encapsulating everything that makes up the Gertrude street community - the physical, the ephemeral, the brave, the crazy, the passionate - the results were projections and installations which explored emotional and psychological narratives that highlighted the streetscape.

Projected light and colour uncovered internal secrets, hidden histories, and undisclosed locations. Artists responded to the hidden spaces within themselves and explored emotional histories and stories within the architecture along Gertrude Street.

With the turn of the decade and Gertrude Street’s third projection festival, the artists were asked to explore their personal and global views on social, economic, environmental, and cultural impacts. Each artist employed colourful light to examine these relationships within themselves, their communities, and their effect on the world.

Dreams could be anything and everything from aspirations, to disasters and fantasies. The second GSPF enticed artists to respond to their Dreams, projecting vibrant images along Gertrude Street of ideas, emotions, and sensations, provoking the greater community to widen their imagination to what could be possible.

The first iteration of the Gertrude Street Projection Festival transformed Gertrude Street into an outdoor gallery, with artists projecting onto pavements, buildings and shop windows. Each artist used experimental projection methods and playful visuals to explore place and self through an urban perspective.