UNEARTHING DANGER
Why would an artist agree to bury their work beneath 100 tonnes of soil?
Join the artists behind HEAP for a rare behind-the-scenes conversation about dangerous ideas and the challenge of creating artworks that audiences must literally dig up. HEAP brings together a diverse group of artists whose practices span disciplines, cultures and generations. The artists will reflect on their responses to the singular curatorial provocation: What is your dangerous idea?
Unearth the tensions, surprises and creative risks embedded within this radically unconventional group exhibition, where artists relinquish control of their work to a large-scale archaeological dig led by an audience in search of buried ideas. Discover what lies beneath the surface – and why it was buried there in the first place.
This is a free session. Book tickets below to secure your spot.
Brook Andrew
Brook Andrew is an artist, curator and writer who is driven by the collisions of intertwined narratives emerging from the mess of the “Colonial Wuba (hole)”. His practice is grounded in his perspective as a Wiradjuri and Celtic person from Australia. Brook is Enterprise Professor Interdisciplinary Practice and Director Reimagining Museums and Collections at the University of Melbourne and is represented by Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, Ames Yavuz Gallery, Sydney/Singapore/London, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels.
Aretha Brown
Aretha Brown is a proudly queer, Blak visual artist and screenwriter from Melbourne’s Western suburbs. Her art is deeply informed by her lived experience as a young Aboriginal woman growing up in an urban colony, using paint, pop-culture and public space to amplify Blak voices and disrupt colonial narratives. Brown (Gumbaynggirr mob) is among the youngest ever artists to exhibit at the National Gallery of Australia as part of the 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial, After the Rain. In 2019, Brown founded the **Kiss My Art Collective, a femme, queer, youth collective with a mission to decolonise public spaces, with over 70 murals worldwide.
Image credit: Sim Kaur
Keg De Souza
Keg de Souza is an artist of Goan ancestry who lives on unceded Gadigal land. Lived experience informs Keg’s layered practice that highlights, often overlooked, stories of people and plants to foster a deeper understanding of place. Her research-driven practice is informed by ecological and food politics, temporary architecture, publishing and radical pedagogy and is developed through conversation, knowledge sharing and archival research.
Image credit: Neil Hannah, Inverleith House
Tarryn Gill
Tarryn Gill is a Boorloo, Western Australian based multidisciplinary artist who works across sculpture, photography, video, drawing, theatre design and performance. Through solo and collaborative practices, she has exhibited works and undertaken residency projects across Australia, Argentina, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US. Through art making Tarryn explores psychological ideas, seeking to bridge the conscious and unconscious, personal and collective, contemporary and ancient. Her theatrical aesthetics, materials and processes are informed by her 20 year background in dance and calisthenics. She draws on these influences to assert the value of the feminine, the personal and the intuitive.
Image credit: Saul Steed
HOSSEI
HOSSEI is a multidisciplinary Australian artist of Persian, Turkish, and Russian ancestry, based in Sydney, working across performance, film, sound, photography, sculpture, costume design and installation. His work centres on the transformative and healing potential of art, exploring softness as a form of strength and creating immersive worlds that draw audiences into moments of care, play, and emotional release. Shaped by lived experiences, cultural memory, dreams, pop sensibility, and everyday rituals, HOSSEI presented TOO~B at the Sydney Opera House, THUNDERBLOOM:LIVE at Carriageworks for Liveworks Festival (2024), ESSSENSSSE at Verge Gallery (2024) and U.F.O. at Blacktown Arts Centre (2024).
Image credit: Jamie James
Sophie Penkethman-Young
Sophie Penkethman-Young is an artist living on unceded Gadigal Land. Sophie has exhibited at Verge Gallery (2021), Artspace (2025) and Gertrude Contemporary (2025). In 2022 Sophie created and performed a live-streamed performance lecture In Progress: The Wait of Expectation at Liveworks festival and in 2025 she presented 404 Psychic Error a body of 3D printed works at Mais Wright in Sydney. In 2026 she was nominated as FBi Radio SMAC artist of the year.
Tim Silver
Tim Silver is a multidisciplinary artist who explores concepts of time and connection. By life casting figures and fragments of his friends and loved ones, the artist presents intimate yet haunting corporeal portraits of connection. These private moments and their transient nature offer a perspective of how personal and collective histories intersect and inform one another. Silver’s work is held in significant private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Murray Art Museum, Albury and Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia.
EJ Son
EJ Son is a Sydney-based artist working across sculpture, installation, and performance. Through humour and provocation, their practice reveals paradox as a human condition: finding in its tension a site of new subjectivity and relations. They investigate the construction of desire and fear: how it circulates, is internalised, and projected. Son is a studio artist at The Clothing Store Artist Studios, and has exhibited across institutions, artist-run initiatives, and festivals in Australia and Korea, including Dark Mofo 2023. They are a recipient of the Samstag Scholarship 2026 and a finalist in the Blake Prize 2026, Wynne Prize and Ramsay Art Prize 2025.
Sophie O’Brien
Sophie O’Brien is a curator, director and writer. Currently Head of Curatorial & Learning at Bundanon, she has also worked in senior curatorial leadership roles at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in Aotearoa, at the Serpentine Galleries and Tate Britain in London, and led exhibition teams for the Australian Pavilions at the Venice Biennale (2005-2007) and the Biennale of Sydney (2003). Sophie has worked on numerous large-scale commissions with artists including Marina Abramović, Adrian Villar Rojas, Wolfgang Tillmans and Gustav Metzger, as well as architects Peter Zumthor, SANAA and Herzog+deMeuron+AiWeiwei.
We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation - the custodians of the country on which we meet - and acknowledge their Elders, past and present.
The views and opinions expressed by the Festival participants are not necessarily the views of The Ethics Centre and our partners.