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Commissioned by Fed Square and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

<h2>In the spirit of togetherness, the Sampling the Future exhibition at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia will spill into Fed Square’s Atrium this festive season, adding a sense wonder to the space.</h2>
Seven supersized knitted architectural towers in vibrant colours, created by Architect Leanne Zilka and Textile Designer Jenny Underwood, will accent the entrance to The Atrium, sparking conversation and joy.
Produced at the RMIT Fashion and Textiles research lab – these textile structures investigate the use of digital design and 3D knitting technologies as an architectural system. Seamless knitting technologies, which ‘print’ 3D forms stitch by stitch (pixel by pixel) allow the designers to produce whole pieces of extruded textile tubes. Combining the scale of architecture with the whole garment technology in textile design, each piece expresses shape using different yarns and threads that have the ability to perform as structures. These works are prototypes of textile ‘skins’ that once combined with emerging digital design and advanced fibres such as carbon fibre and Dyneema yarns could feasibly offer ways to rapidly knit high-strength, light-weight forms for columns and other architectural elements with material efficiency and minimal waste.
The supersized towers aim to invite visitors back into Fed Square, celebrating togetherness and the human spirit. With vibrant colours that remind us of the Australian summer, Knitted Architecture delivers joy through colour and decoration.

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<h2>Christmas in the Square</h2>
Get ready to get Fed festive, as we are turning up the fun dial to the max to celebrate the silly season, being out and about again – and being able to properly say hello, Melbourne!
Of course, all your favourites will be back: Christmas Square, featuring the HUGE 16metre-high Christmas tree and ever-popular Santa’s Workshop for all those cute happy snaps with the big guy in red.
While you’re there, you must also drop by to have a selfie with Fred and Fifi, dressed in their finest Christmas-themed get-up – they’re enormous light-up sculpture installations, thanks to the creative mastery of the team at A Blanck Canvas.
Rounding out the action is the Pillars of Light festival for Chanukah; Koorie Kristmas with the Koorie Heritage Trust; Christmas in the Wizarding World at Fed Square, featuring a not-to-be-missed live performance from the cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; followed closely by Wizard Week, where we&#8217;re screening all the Harry Potter films up on the Big Screen, marathon-style; a santa-sack-packed program of your fave Christmas films; the Fed Christmas Workshop series, featuring a sure-to-be-a-hot-ticket Christmas Wreath workshop with Melbourne floristry icon Flowers Vasette; and heaps more!
Check out the full program below and start planning your Fed festivities this Christmas at the Square!

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Fed Festive Season

Exhibitions

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia will reopen 3 November
Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories is the first major retrospective of Melbourne-based artist and designer, Maree Clarke, who is a Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung woman. Clarke is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of south-east Australian Aboriginal art and cultural practices and has a passion for reviving and sharing elements of Aboriginal culture that were lost – or lying dormant – as a consequence of colonisation. 
Covering more than three decades of artistic output, the exhibition traverses Clarke’s multidisciplinary practice across photography, printmaking, sculpture, jewellery, video, glass and more. Documenting Clarke’s life as told through her art, the exhibition includes rarely-seen black-and-white photographs that bring to life key figures and events in Melbourne during the 1990s, through to her most accomplished and critically-acclaimed work of recent years, including major mixed media installations, contemporary jewellery incorporating kangaroo-teeth, river reed and echidna quills, through to lenticular prints and photographic holograms. 
Reflecting Clarke’s continuing desire to affirm and reconnect with her cultural heritage, the exhibition displays her contemporary artworks alongside key loans of historical material from Museum Victoria, highlighting her deep engagement with and reverence for the customary ceremonies, rituals, objects and language of her ancestors. 
A central feature of the exhibition is Clarke’s dramatic glass eel traps, Ancestral Memory I &amp; II, 2019. Taking formal reference from traditional woven eel traps, these suspended sculptures simultaneously evoke the ancient and the contemporary, highlighting Clarke’s unique ability to bring tradition into the present. Conical in shape, the traps were designed to capture river eels, which swam into the opening and then became lodged in the narrow tip. 
Also on display is a large-scale, 60-pelt possum-skin cloak by Clarke, commissioned especially for this exhibition by the NGV. The work draws on Clarke’s deep cultural knowledge amassed through the statewide possum-skin cloak reclamation project with fellow Koorie artists, including Vicki Couzens, Lee Darroch and Treahna Hamm. By meticulously researching traditional designs and the practice of cloak making, Clarke and her fellow artists helped to revive this important garment making skills, producing the first possum-skin cloaks in Victoria for the first time in over 150 years. Clarke’s never-before-seen contemporary cloak is displayed alongside an incredibly rare historical example, illuminating the synergies between past and present, as well as the rigour that underpins Clarke’s creative process. A further highlight is Clarke’s monumental photographic series, Ritual and Ceremony, 2013, which comprises 84 portraits of prominent Aboriginal community figures painted with white ochre. The dress and markings reference the mourning practices of Aboriginal people along the Murray/Darling rivers, but also each individual&#8217;s personal experiences of loss of land, language and culture, having each shared with Clarke their own stories of sorrow and mourning during the making of their portrait. 
Tony Ellwood AM, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, said: ‘Maree has been a practising artist living and working in Melbourne for the last three decades. This exhibition not only explores Clarke’s extraordinary career, but it also strongly attests to the power of cultural reclamation. As the first living artist to exhibit at NGV with ancestral ties to the Country on which the Gallery stands, this exhibition is a momentous milestone in the NGV’s history.’ 
Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories will be on display at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from 25 June to 3 October 2021. Entry is free. For further details, please visit the NGV website: <a href="https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/">https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/</a>

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Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories

Atrium Precinct

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia

Free

<h2>18-23 December 2022</h2>
A little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness.
Pillars of Light, in celebration of Chanukah, is providing Melbournians with an opportunity to come together over a multicultural celebration, focusing on what unites us as a city.
Each evening features a bespoke program highlighting the core precepts of connection and collaboration through guest speakers, dignitaries, artistic performers, cultural groups, sports people and more, who’ll be invited to light the menorah, bringing together our varied communities through hope, positivity, love and light.
Pillars of Light has sourced local and known multicultural, faith and Indigenous artists and choirs that will perform during the festival.
You are welcome to join us this holiday season for what is a phenomenal display of multiculturalism and diversity in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD &#8211; Fed Square!
Pillars of Light thanks its Principal Partner Gandel Foundation for their generosity and support over the past 3 years. Together with the Victorian Government, ARK Centre and Fed Square. Gold Partners Pratt Foundation, Erdi Foundation, Melbourne City Council and Bindy &amp; David Koadlow
Pillars of Light is a free event.

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Chanukah - Pillars of Light 2022

The Main Square

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The Atrium

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Fed Square has partnered with the NGV to present a public installation to celebrate the spirit of the festive season - Knitted Architecture.

Knitted Architecture, 2021 - Fed Square, Melbourne Australia

Knitted Architecture, 2021

Knitted Architecture, 2021

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In the spirit of togetherness, the Sampling the Future exhibition at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia will spill into Fed Square’s Atrium this festive season, adding a sense wonder to the space.

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