SCAPE 8, New Intimacies curated by Rob Garrett is a contemporary art event which mixes new artworks with existing legacy pieces, an education programme, and a public programme of events. The SCAPE 8 artworks will be located around central Christchurch and linked via a public art walkway. All aspects of SCAPE 8 are free-to-view. The title for the 2015 Biennial – New Intimacies – comes from the idea that visually striking and emotionally engaging public art works can create new connections between people and places. Under the main theme of New Intimacies there are three other themes that artists will respond to: Sight-Lines, Inner Depths and Shared Strengths.

• Sight-Lines engages with the changed landscape of the city centre, with its new vistas opened up across city blocks, out to the Port Hills and beyond. Artists have been invited to consider how the city’s new spatial character has the potential to stimulate fresh thinking.
• Inner Depths recognises Christchurch as a water city; where liquefaction, flood and failed infrastructure mean that water has taken on a new significance.  Through this theme, artists were invited to explore subterranean strata and water flows; as well as exploring underground water as a metaphor for the city’s cultural layers and memories.
• Shared Strengths recognises the resilience of people, and the power of helpfulness and self-organising communities to buoy the city through tough years. Several SCAPE 8 projects honour and celebrate the ongoing, everyday phenomenon of people helping each other.

In a concurrent programme an international conference Curating under Pressure: a symposium on the ethics of curating, takes place at the University of Canterbury on November 5-8. Image: Christchurch Central overlooking the Avon River; photo courtesy of Rob Garrett, Curator, SCAPE 8.