ANCHOR. Familiar worlds turned inside-out and upside-down.
This year’s New Annual festival in Newcastle, NSW, invites visitors to see the city’s familiar corners transformed by bold, immersive art — including a trio of shipping containers repurposed as micro-worlds. In a city like Newcastle where the shipping container is a ubiquitous and utilitarian object carrying cargo in and out of the city daily, it is the perfect canvas to hand over to artists to reimagine. Created specifically for New Annual these containers host sensory and optical experiences that reorient how audiences engage with place, time and memory.
On the walk to Nobby Headland/Whibayganba you’ll find a shipping container turned inhabitable camera obscura by Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline (MAPA) using nothing but old fashioned analogue lens. Light filters through a tiny aperture to cast an upside-down, moving projection of the headland, lighthouse and passersbys onto the inner walls lined with a salvaged parachute and sand filled tubes. Visitors are ushered in for a four minute experience to sit and be immersed in soundscape Axelsen cobbled together from field recordings of coal loaders, passing ships, her local Tighes Hill community choir and her breath.
The pair drawing upon their background in architecture and sculpture have created both a disorienting and meditative device: an invitation to be still, dark, yet deeply connected to place or as the name suggests anchored. In a time of relentless inversions, upended certainties, unpredictability, here is a small space and time for stillness to be here but not be, to be an observer. Children are given drawings of sounds to listen out for and visitors emerge from the space seeing a familiar place in a new light.
Nearby in Camp Shortland lies Listen to a Starfish, by Dr. Diana Chester and composer Damien Ricketson. Visitors are invited to sit and listen to sounds gathered by hydrophones, underground geophones and precision microphones, unearthing secret conversations of the seascapes into something you can feel as much as hear. Next door you’ll find a rouge shipping container Argo Escargot full of cargo of tall tales, lost histories and a healthy dose of the absurd carefully constructed by local artist Jen Denzin.
These three containers form part of a self-guided public art trail stretching along Camp Shortland and the Newcastle foreshore. Across Newcastle, the containers assert that art can shift perspective, not always by spectacle, but by invitation: to dwell, to reflect, to listen. The New Annual festival embraces these installations as part of a broader mission to reimagine familiar places, to give audiences new ways into the known and beloved landscapes of their city. For the curious and the open, these container experiences are among the festival’s quiet revelations. The artists and festival director Tory Loudon hope this is the seed for an expanded art container installations for the following festivals!
About Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline
Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline are a collaborative creative duo working between the discursive criticality of arts practice and the applied, spatial and urban scales of architecture and design. Axelsen and Moline’s work is deeply site- specific. Typically generated through longterm collaborations with particular places, they contemplate the complex, often overlapping communities who dwell and pass through them, and experiment with forms of speculative fabulation, grounded in community-based research and social processes.
Their work critically examines the current ways in which the world is arranged, and why the things our lives depend on the most - such as plant life, or care work - are so undervalued. As a response to these questions, they make work which speculates other ways of organising ourselves or relating to others; building fragments of these other worlds, and the tools, furniture, shelters and systems which may enable these alternate relations to flourish. Significant exhibitions and commissions include: Field Rooms (2025) City of Sydney, Memory Vessel a permanent public artwork at Westmead Hospital (2020), Plant Nation (2021) commissioned by UAP, The Visitors (2019) MAMA Gallery, Owner Occupy, (2015) Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation & 2000 Waraji 200 Feet (2015), Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial.
ANCHOR: Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline
New Annual Public Art Trail
until 5 October 2025
https://newannual.com/explore/events/anchor
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The University of Newcastle acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands within our footprint areas: Awabakal, Darkinjung, Biripai, Worimi, Wonnarua, and Eora Nations. We also pay respect to the wisdom of our Elders past and present.