Mildura Palimpsest Symposium
17-19 September 2010

Mildura Palimpsest is Australia’s foremost environmental arts festival. Inaugurated in 1998 Palimpsest continues the rich experimental tradition established by the Mildura Sculptural Triennials in the early 1970s. Palimpsest is currently a Biennial event, with a Symposium held in the intervening year between expositions. Palimpsest #7 was run in 2009 and included site specific artwork by more than 50 interstate and international artists. The symposium is held to broaden community engagement and encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue.

The Palimpsest Symposium brings contemporary visual arts practice together with cross-disciplinary dialogue to explore the nexus of nature and culture. Located in the arid border territories and struggling horticultural communities at the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers in Victoria and NSW, Palimpsest provides an opportunity for artists to work outside the metropolitan white cube. Artist residencies and Symposia run between the biennial Palimpsest exposition encourage creative dialogue on vital issues that extend beyond state and national borders.

Palimpsest, meaning a parchment which has been partly erased and re-inscribed, evokes the marks made by human settlement on the land, the passage of time, presence and absence, and the web of inter-dependence connecting the natural and the cultural, the material and the immaterial, spheres of existence.

In 2010 Mildura Palimpsest will work collaboratively with the Australian Experimental Art Foundation’s '(to) give time to time’ project. The Mildura site, will re-instate the highly productive collaboration between Mildura and the AEAF, Adelaide, which continued throughout the 1970s during the Mildura Sculpture Triennials.

The artworks will be placed in the Mildura landscape, sometimes alongside pieces still in place since the original triennials in the 60s and 70s and provide for the Mildura community an indication of the significance of Mildura’s contribution to the nations art history.

2009

Murray Darling Palimpsest Symposium: Mildura, April 3 - 5, 2009
Over 100 artists addressed the theme of displacement and exhibited their work throughout the Basin in April 2009, with more than 40 artists exhibiting in the Mildura region as commissioned, fringe or part of the exciting initiative, The Wentworth Gaol project.

2006

Murray Darling Palimpsest Symposium: Mildura, August, 206
Click here to view the 2006 Murray Darling Palimpsest program