In an ambitious collaboration with the Art Gallery of South Australia, the team behind contemporary art magazine, fine print, will host the publication's first ever live edition.

Earlier this year, Colours of Impressionism broke visitor records at The Art Gallery of South Australia. Part of the current Chiharu Shiota exhibition includes a commissioned work that uses 180km of bright red wool to create an eye-catching geometric bower. But the most ambitious project at the gallery in 2018 might be an upcoming edition of fine print.

The vast majority of writing about art is dedicated to celebrating temporary exhibitions, but the online contemporary arts magazine is focussing its attention squarely on the Gallery’s permanent collection. “I think it’s something that we set out to do when we first started fine print, is telling writers that they were welcome to visit existing works to help us look at things in a different way,” explains Gillian Brown, who is co-director alongside Rayleen Forester and Joanna Kitto.

Practicing artists dominate the publication’s contributor list, and the trio is constantly looking for new ways to approach and respond to artworks. For Joanna, this means “offering our readers different ways of approaching ideas, so that it’s not all the written word. They can watch a little video, they can listen to a podcast on their way to work.” The extension of that is to create a “live edition” – a one hour curated journey through the Melrose Wing that will be recorded and edited into an edition of the magazine.

Co-directors of fine print, Gillian Brown, Joanna Kitto and Rayleen Forester.

Like a physical magazine, there will be a linear progression to the evening as performances move through the wing but audiences are free to dip in and out. Most people don’t read a magazine cover to cover in one sitting, and part of the challenge for the co-directors has been to create a series of works that complement each other while also functioning as standalone performances that anyone can enjoy. Rayleen describes the balance they’ve struck as “accessible but also critical and interesting.”

The evening will include a piece that mimics the short form responses of a regular fine print edition by asking two local curators to select a work each and then speak about their relationship with it in less than 200 words. Each artist will present a response to both works, which means that one will be prepared and one created on the spot. Other performances will address entire gallery spaces or the artist’s relationship with European art in general.

“We’re quite open to experimentation and quite flexible but it’s still got to have some sort of framework,” Gillian explains. “It’s not just a series of talks or performances; it is an issue of fine print so we’ve worked quite hard to make sure that it reflects the pace of one of our regular issues.”