GUEST EDITOR, EUGENIA LIM

This issue our guest editor is Eugenia Lim – video and interdisciplinary artist, writer, editor and one-time human tamagotchi. She recently lived in a bedroom installation at West Space gallery for a week to explore the phenomenon of hikikomori or ‘shut in’ syndrome. She has a piece in the upcoming Experimenta International Biennale of Media Art and Place of Assembly, a group show to farewell the halcyon days of her home base, the Schoolhouse Studios. Eugenia is also the editor of the newly launched Assemble Papers, an online publication about living together better. Eugenia told us all about her dog, Chips, and other things she likes about Melbourne.

ART MELBOURNE – ART FAIR

If you listen closely you can already hear the nails being hammered as more than 80 local and international galleries gear up for the biennial Melbourne Art Fair. You can also just make out the sound of sweat dripping off the forehead of this year’s public commission artist, Ian Burns. If you don’t manage to stuff his installation Clouds into your tote, browse for portable art objects at the Third Drawer Down pop-up shop instead. Better yet, meet some emerging artists in the Project Rooms, a studio playground for independents including Gertrude Contemporary, Next Wave and BUS Projects.

1–5 August Royal Exhibition Building Carlton Gardens.

EUGENIA LIM

I have a penchant for video-based art, and people who really know how to screen them pixels are Kyle and Simone at Screen Space. They also run a commercial gallery upstairs, Beam. In the DIY vein, Radio Valerie is an internet station that broadcasts out of a tiny carpeted room above theGasometer – they play everything from Turkish funk to noise and sometimes host motley and great parties too. I like combining food and art, so Heide is my kind of place – here I can eat a Shannon Bennett brioche burger while communing with Sunday Reed.

EVENTS – MIFF

Tripling the sales of takeaway coffee and hipflasks, the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) strides into town each winter bearing gifts from across the globe (usually Cannes). This year the festival turns the lens on art itself with a fantastical French animation about the life of an unfinished painting in Le Tableau, and two documentaries on very different artists: a Chinese dissident in the gripping rally cry Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, and a much-revered provocateur preparing for her career-defining MOMA retrospective in Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present.

2–19 August, citywide.

EUGENIA LIM

My all-time favourite venue is The Forum – its indoor night-sky and kitsch Romanesque vibe make me happy to be alive. Two festivals I religiously attend are MIFF and the Melbourne Festival. During either you will find me a) spilling choc-tops on my lap or b) supping wine from plastic cups, cramming in as many films or gigs as time and my eftpos card will allow. I love the kooky, fascinating films programmed by Ghita Lobenstein of Speakeasy Cinema – a gypsy cinema without a home. I’ve also been meaning to get to No Lights No Lycra a weekly dance-jam, social sweat-fest started by my friend Alice Glenn.

RETAIL – MOTTO MELBOURNE

Londoner Joe Shakespeare has recently switched hemispheres, bringing a smuggler’s crate of publications and setting up a Melbourne base for renowned art book distributor Motto. Kitted out with rugs and plants, Motto Melbourne is now up and running at the Compound Interest Centre for the Applied Arts. Bring Joe a coffee and you will be rewarded with a thorough chat, not to mention a one-man library tour of publishers including Sweden’s Libraryman, New York’s N+1, Leipzig’s Spector Books – and Australia’s own Serps Zine, which has taken a round trip.

15–25 Keele Street,Collingwood.
Tel: 0468 369 030.

EUGENIA LIM

NIGHTLIFE – THE EVERLEIGH

Melbourne’s not exactly lacking in galleries or cocktail bars, but places that combine the two and do it well are rare beasts. Sasha Petraske – owner of New York’s Milk and Honey – offers a protean corrective with The Everleigh. It’s either a prohibition-era bar that hosts occasional contemporary art openings, or a gallery with one of the best cocktail lists this side of the Pacific. Immersion – an interactive subaquatic projection commissioned for Experimenta Playground – is on show from 20 July .The Everleigh’s trademark ice (cut to order) is on show from now until eternity.

Level 1, 150–156
Gertrude Street, Fitzroy.
Tel: 03 9416 2229.

EUGENIA LIM

I live in the Brunx, so I’m very Brunswick-biased! My local is the Union Hotel. I can’t go past their pie and mash! The atmosphere is always friendly and cosy. Albert St Food & Wine is a stumble away from my house and it is here that my obsession with any food containing pomegranates was born. I go to Bar Idda to be transported to a Sicilian Nonna’s house without leaving Lygon Street. Other favourites are breakfast with a smile from Jake and Andrew at Newtown SC, Babka for a berry danish and the always bustling A1 Bakery for Lebanese spinach pies and baklava.

WIN – POT HEADS AT CRAFT CUBED

Craft Cubed is Craft Victoria‘s month-long celebration of experimental and skills-based craft and design. Come August it will be taking over the city, showcasing thousands of our most talented local makers in more than 50 venues, studios and galleries. Right now Valerie Restarick and Kim Jaeger are hand-building and throwing their way to a collection of vessels for their exhibition Quiet Connections, on display at North Carlton Ceramics from 3 August. We have one of Kim’s friendly Pot Heads to give away! To enter, tell us what you would put in him. Email us (use the link, don’t reply) by 5pm, Monday 23 July.

Craft Cubed
3 August – 1 September
citywide

EUGENIA LIM

Craft Cubed is Craft Victoria‘s month-long celebration of experimental and skills-based craft and design. Come August it will be taking over the city, showcasing thousands of our most talented local makers in more than 50 venues, studios and galleries. Right now Valerie Restarick and Kim Jaeger are hand-building and throwing their way to a collection of vessels for their exhibition Quiet Connections, on display at North Carlton Ceramics from 3 August. We have one of Kim’s friendly Pot Heads to give away! To enter, tell us what you would put in him. Email us (use the link, don’t reply) by 5pm, Monday 23 July.