Cultural links across the Tasman
Alison Carroll, Director, Asialink Arts Program, at the Asia:New Zealand Foundation office in Wellington, with Jennifer King, Director, Culture.
Asia:New Zealand Foundation, the arm of the New Zealand government tasked with increasing engagement with Asia across a number of areas, including the arts, invited Asialink’s Arts Director, Alison Carroll, to review their cultural program earlier this year.
Alison spent a week in Wellington and Auckland in early February speaking to key industry figures and recipients of Asia:New Zealand Foundation grants about the current program, how it is perceived, and what might be possible in the future.
A focus of their current work is arts residencies, in Asia and also in NZ, and the idea came up of an international artists’ village, perhaps in old buildings in one of Wellington’s spectacular bays. An artists’ village would provide a dynamic meeting point, attractive to international participants, and be easier and cheaper to promote and run than one-off ventures around the country. It’s an idea that has been very successful in Tokyo and Taipei for a number of years, and increasingly in Seoul and other centres of the region.
A subtext of the visit was seeing how Australian and New Zealand practitioners and organisations might work better together in the Asian region, in this increasingly borderless world. That artists’ village idea could of course include Australians as well as others from our region.