VESSEL PROGRAM 2025



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VESSEL SEASON 1:

27 JUNE - 10 AUGUST






Vessel launches its inaugural season of programming with a major exhibition of newly-commissioned, site-responsive work celebrating an experimental and collaborative  approach to both the practice and presentation of painting.

Promoting career defining moments for early career artists to present works to scale. An artist-in-residence will run concurrently, alongside an exhibition at CURRENT Gallery together with an extensive program of related discursive events allowing ample opportunities for audiences to further engage with contemporary art and ideas of our time.



GIAN MANIKFor this first major solo exhibition at Vessel, Boorloo/Perth-born and now Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Gian Manik will collaborate with students from eight local primary schools to create a suite of large-scale paintings reflecting on ideas of place. Created in collaboration with over 250 children from eight primary schools in and near the Walyalup/Fremantle area, the work is a reflection upon ideas of environment and place, encompassing deep time thinking, contemporary contexts and speculative visions for the future.
This living, breathing time capsule is a generous, experimental conversation between the artist and local community.

Focusing on intergenerational skill-sharing and exchange as well as audience and community development; Manik’s exhibition is a pertinent and poetic response to environmental issues and experimental approach to painting, both in practice and presentation.

Gian Manik is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist, who was born and raised in Boorloo/Perth. His dextrous approach to image-making is characterised by an irreverence for genre and driven by a compulsion to paint. Interested in undermining the colonial properties arming the buttresses of historical painting, Manik complicates tradition through the representation of symbolically multivalent and tangential subjects.

Gian’s major exhibition at Vessel mirrors many of the values and principles of the organisation, including a commitment to collaboration, platforming diverse perspectives, embracing experimentation, and a belief in the critical importance of lifelong development and learning. 

Gian Manik is represented by Sutton Gallery.Gian Manik is collaborating with eight local primary schools across the Walyalup/Fremantle Area:

  • Lance Holt School
  • North Fremantle Primary School
  • East Fremantle Primary School
  • White Gum Valley Primary School
  • Richmond Primary School
  • Beaconsfield Primary School
  • Cottesloe Primary School
  • Our Lady of Fatima


AMANDA BELLVessel is proud to announce the launch of its Artist-in-Residence program with acclaimed First Nations artist Amanda Bell as the inaugural resident. Amanda Bell, a Badimia Yamatji and Yued Noongar woman who was born on Whadjuk Country and raised on Wardandi Country in Undalup/Busselton, brings her diverse artistic practice to Vessel's new purpose-built creative space in Walyalup.

"I seek to engage with others by telling stories in a way that is 'right way' for me as an Aboriginal person and artist, and to make a contribution to making spaces culturally safe in the arts and beyond."

Amanda Bell, whose work spans multiple mediums and continually evolves to express her artistic intent and cultural heritage.
The eight-week paid residency coincides with Vessel's inaugural 2025 season and runs alongside our major exhibition, open to the public from June 21 to August 3. The residency space, designed by Ren Tapely (Future Materials), showcases sustainable construction practices using reused, recycled, and low-carbon materials, reflecting Vessel's commitment to environmental responsibility and innovative creative approaches.

This public-facing program provides valuable space, time, and connections for artistic development while engaging the local community. Vessel aims to create a contemporary environment that promotes experimentation and learning through practice, with the residency serving as a hub for development, mentorship, and artistic collaboration.

Vessel is dedicated to representing emerging and experimental practices across all art forms, and this residency program marks an important step in fulfilling that mission.
PUBLIC PROGRAMMING2025 is an exciting first year of programming with plenty of activities for the community. This will include peer-to-peer learning opportunities, artist-led talks and workshops and community engagement initiatives.

These programs will transform the space into a place for audience participation and artistic experimentation.

LANDING
THOUGHTSVessel joins Landing Thoughts in the delivery of a six part peer-to-peer learning series designed for practicing contemporary artists and creatives.  Previously modelled as a one year distance course, for this new adapted version together with Vessel, Kate and Magni will lead 6 thematic sessions, aimed at artists/makers/thinkers to further develop their practice in a new context. Through mutual learning, material investigations and conversation this experimental model of knowledge production also examines what it is to land delicate thoughts in language.

Landing Thoughts, founded by Kate Moss, Laura Piasta, and Magni Moss is a post academy distance course for practising artists, makers and thinkers, developed from a shared desire to form new critical conversations within the contemporary arts discourse.


landingthoughts.com
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POLITICAOur ongoing Public Program is a collaboration with Cinema Politica. A curated selection of documentary films will be screened accompanied by invited speakers to prompt discussion.

Cinema Politica is an international network that  distributes and streams independent films. Cinema Politica shares Vessel’s belief in the power of art to not only entertain but to engage, inform, inspire, and provoke social change

cinemapolitica.orgFREMANTLE BIENNALEA collaborative commission by Fremantle Biennale and Vessel

Step into an unfurling cosmos of sound, movement and poetry in Microfictions— a major new commission by internationally acclaimed duo Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser), in collaboration with Vessel Contemporary. Occupying Fremantle’s iconic Naval Store, this live performance installation is a slowly shifting meditation on land, love and deep time.

Audiences are invited to recline in suspended hammocks — floating, as if in the ocean — while a sand mandala in the form of a topographical map morphs slowly beneath them. Charting a course from the ancient supercontinent Pangea to the speculative future of Pangea Ultima, performers trace the outlines of the evolving continents with materials native and invasive — white sand, crushed limestone, salt, even flecks of gold, camel hair and cuttlefish— shaping and reshaping borders in an eternal drama of impermanence.

Tapping into planetary turbulence, Microfictions is a poetic and sonic meditation on weight — what anchors us — and lightness — what defies gravity and how we drift.  Accompanied by a score for upright bass, electric harp and percussion, recalling the tectonic rhythms and rumbles of the Earth, Microfictions traverses oceans, continents and hemispheres imagining futures of intermingling cultures and languages, ecological entanglements and human-nonhuman dependencies. This is a powerful call to the intimacy of deep memory and land both as displacement and reconciliation.

Hylozoic/Desires’ expansive and celebrated practice has been presented at leading institutions including the Serpentine (London), Desert X (California), Shanghai Biennale,  Venice Biennale, Sharjah Biennale and the Swiss Institute (New York). Microfictions marks their much-anticipated Australian premiere.


fremantlebiennale.com.au
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