▿ curate ◦◎

Curation is a practice. Not a service, not a support role, not the thing you do while waiting for your own work to be shown. It is the work. The decisions about what gets a room, who gets a wall, what sits next to what, what gets made possible and what quietly doesn't, these are aesthetic and political acts with consequences that outlast the exhibition.

Space3 ran at 151 Regent Street, Chippendale from 2000 to 2006. I co-founded it and directed it across that entire period. In that time it became a genuine site of Sydney's contemporary art culture, not because it was well resourced or well located but because it was committed and alive. It supported emerging artists, many of whom are recognised now, because someone made a room available before anyone else thought it was worth doing. That is what artist-run spaces do. They precede the market by several years and receive no credit for it.

The program at Space3 ran across photography, new media, performance, installation, and interdisciplinary practice. We hosted Futura 2000 in December 2002, a New York graffiti and visual artist whose presence in a Chippendale warehouse was not a curated event in any institutional sense. It was a conversation about what belonged in a room and who got to decide. We published a hardcover monograph on the Space3 program in 2006, supported by a $22,000 NSW Ministry for the Arts grant. It is an archival document. It is also a record of what it costs to hold something open for six years.

The ecosystem Space3 sat inside mattered as much as the space itself. Lanfranchi's Memorial Discotheque, 107 Projects, Knott Gallery at Hibernian House. These were not separate institutions. They were a network, a way of keeping practice alive in a city that consistently undervalues the infrastructure that makes culture possible. I understood Space3 as a node in that network, not a destination.

Curation continued after Space3. Fraser Street Studio 10 Visual Arts Body in Surry Hills in 2008. Teaching at UNSW, UTS, and the University of Sydney across disciplines where the curatorial question, what gets shown, what gets made, what gets taught, is always present even when the word is not used. The practice is ongoing. It does not require a gallery to operate.

SPACE3 2000-2005 is a hardcover monograph documenting over three years of activity at Space3 Gallery, 151 Regent Street, Chippendale. Designed, produced and edited by James Hancock with funding assistance from the NSW Ministry of the Arts. The book covers performance, music, installation, projection, and traditional and non-traditional art exhibitions across the full program. Out of Space3 many other communities formed and grew, and other galleries in the area sprung up from this basic need for creative people to exhibit and show their work to others.

For the inaugural edition of Sydney Contemporary, under the direction of Barry Keldoulis, this space was generously provided as a platform for experimental curation. Curated by Melletios Kyriakidis, this debut-year showcase featured a diverse range of contemporary artists:

Sumugan Sivanesan
Tania Doropoulos
Michala Davies
Roger de Souza
Mark Gerada
James Hancock
Rully Zakaria
Shann Preece
Melletios Kyriakidis
Rowan Wilson
Alex Davies
Hannah Buck
Shannon Johnson
Rudy Ardantio