The Next Wave: Art in New Contexts
Featuring some of Sydney’s most exciting emerging talent and facilitated by UAP | Urban Art Projects, this panel explores the breadth of opportunities available to artists and commissioners, as well as the ecosystems that support multifaceted creative careers. Through discussion of recent presentations, forthcoming public art commissions, multimedia activations, fashion design, book publishing, and other ambitious projects, the conversation will examine how gallery-based practice both shapes and is shaped by access to new audiences, evolving modes of art-making, and diverse exhibition contexts. Offering insight into the ideas, collaborations, and ambitions driving the next generation of cultural producers, the panel provides a timely snapshot of contemporary practice in motion.
Benjamin Clay | Host
Jazz Money | Speaker
Billy Bain | Speaker
Anna May Kirk | Speaker
Ellinor Pelz | Speaker
Each talk runs for approximately 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of Q&A. A valid ticket to Sydney Contemporary 2026 is required for entry to this talk. Buy tickets online here.
About the Speakers
Jazz Money is a Wiradjuri poet and artist. They are the author of the award-winning poetry collections how to make a basket and mark the dawn. As a visual artist, Jazz works with poetics to create immersive storied spaces. Their writing and art has been presented, performed and published around the world.
Billy Bain is a Dharug artist whose practice examines Indigenous identity, material storytelling and the reimagining of cultural narratives within contemporary Australia. Working across ceramic sculpture, painting, printmaking, installation, and new media commissions, Bain draws on lineage, family histories and his lifelong engagement with surfing to explore relationships to place, community and belonging.
Anna May Kirk is an artist and curator exploring how environments transform across human and geological time, and how this change is perceived in the present. Grounded in sustained field research and collaborations with scientists, Kirk investigates how climatic events, extraction histories and technologies of measurement shape understandings of an increasingly unstable planet.
Ellinor Pelz works closely with artists, clients and consultants across Australia and the GCC, leading the curatorial and strategic development of public art strategies and masterplans as UAP Curator. Her practice celebrates public art’s vital role in shaping meaningful cultural, social and ecological conditions of place. She has held roles across leading galleries and is an independent writer.
Benjamin Clay, in the capacity of Associate (UAP), works across major infrastructure and development projects throughout Australia. He is committed to fostering highly integrated creative outcomes that enrich public space and support meaningful community engagement. Benjamin has held roles across leading galleries and cultural institutions and teaches sessionally in the Faculty of Art History at the University of Sydney.
About Sydney Contemporary
Sydney Contemporary, presented by MA Financial Group, returns to Carriageworks from 3-6 September, bringing together 100 galleries from nine countries for the 10th edition of Australasia’s premier art fair. For four unforgettable days of discovery, conversation and spectacle, Carriageworks becomes the centre of the art world in our region. Alive with buzzing crowds, ambitious installations, performances, talks and inspiring encounters with artists and galleries, it’s Sydney’s most exciting cultural event this spring and an event not to miss.
