Carriageworks Goes Supersize with New 2014 Program

It's getting hard to remember a time in Sydney when Carriageworks was just a railyard and not the cool and cutting-edge arts powerhouse of today. The venue was in the spotlight this year when it hosted Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia and the Sydney Contemporary art fair, the latter of which saw it bust open a new wing, doubling the existing physical space to an intimidating 12,000 square metres. Attendance is up four-fold since 2011, and now you can start tallying up the number of times you'll be visiting in 2014 (answer: many, so many), since next year's program has just been announced.

"In 2014, Carriageworks unveils an artistic program that is ambitious, risk taking, and above all is artist-led and unrelenting in its support of artists," says Carriageworks director Lisa Havilah. "We remain committed to delivering distinctive, high-quality urban cultural experiences to our audiences."

Carriageworks opens the year with the Sydney Festival in January, for which its hosting Christian Boltanski's Chance. Taking up the public space last year filled by Waste Not, Chance is a work of a similar scale. To walk through it is to reflect on the thin barrier between life and death, and it also gives you a chance to win a prize.

The epic art continues in March, when Carriageworks become a Biennale of Sydney major venue partner for the first time, hosting multimedia works by the likes of Tacita Dean. Later in the year, the space also hosts Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh's durational performance art work Time Clock Piece, for which the artist punched a time clock in his studio on the hour, every hour for one whole year. It sounds like the worst Julie & Julia-esque blog project ever, but as art, it's been hugely acclaimed.

MBFWA returns to make fabulous use of the industrial Carriageworks caverns from April 7-11, showcasing the latest collections from the Asia-Pacific's finest designers. This year, one fashion house is going especially arty, with Romance Was Born presenting a special exhibition. Working with multidisciplinary artist Rebecca Baumann, they'll be exploring their bold and unmistakable wonderlands beyond the textile.

Other major events to make landfall at Carriageworks are design talkfest Semi-Permanent and a new creative summit called REMIX, which sounds positively Vivid-esque. The event is global, however, and set to be held in five "creative hubs" worldwide in 2014 — London, New York, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Sydney. Prefer to do your thinking over a bottle of red? Sustainable food and wine festival Rootstock is happening at the venue in February.

Eclectic performances — especially those that may fall in the gaps between traditional venues — are at the heart of Carriageworks, and there's plenty on throughout 2014. Ganesh Versus the Third Reich is making its Sydney debut after winning the Helpmann Award for Best Play last year, and the local Ever After Theatre Company are producing an uber-relevant work called Social Network Stories to premiere at the venue. A new wave of opera comes via Sydney Chamber Opera, composer Michael Smetanin and writer Alison Croggon, whose Mayakovsky redeems Stalin's favourite poet.

Dance-inflected works are many and exciting, including Lemi Ponifasio's spiritual and ceremonial Stones in Her Mouth, French contemporary dancers Compagnie Didier Theron in their first visit to Australia and a new solo piece by Byron Perry that is performed within a real, large-scale camera obscura. An intriguing hybrid work is Rizzy Maharajah's 18th Birthday Party, a live concert and film experience by Carriageworks' inaugural associate artist, S. Shakthidharan.

To see the full program and get more information, check out the Carriageworks website.