Micke Lindebergh, 200 George Street, Sydney. Curated and produced by ART AID for Mirvac.
Some places have soul. You know within a few seconds of arriving, and so does everybody else.
Two precincts can be built to the same standard, by the same calibre of architect, with the same retail mix, and one of them will feel alive while the other feels like a rendering someone walked into. The difference is almost never the design. It is culture, and whether any was ever invited in.
Why so much activation money disappears
Developers understand this now, and a great deal of money is being spent on precinct activation to fix it. Much of that money does not work, and it fails in two predictable ways.
The first is that an agency can have genuinely good ideas and still bring nothing with them. A concept is not a constituency. If the people behind the activation have little to no standing in the creative community, no artists who trust them and no audience who follows them, then the event has to manufacture a crowd from scratch, every time, with paid media. That is an expensive way to look busy.
The second is harder and less often admitted. You cannot activate your way out of a precinct that has gone quiet. If a site has tenancies sitting empty behind branded vinyl, it looks like a place on pause, and people do not turn up to a party at an address that looks closed. The budget is spent, the numbers come back thin, and the conclusion drawn is usually that activation does not work here.
The empty tenancy and the underperforming activation are treated as two separate line items. They are the same problem.
We start with the artists
ART AID is a curator before it is anything else. What we do in a vacant tenancy is not an exhibition in an empty shop, and it is not an event series. It is a residency program, and it is designed to bring culture into a precinct rather than stage something on top of one.
We design and build the tenancy as a proper retail environment. Every one of these stores has been curated and produced by ART AID, with Eddie Zammit assisting on art direction and design. Then artists move in.
They work in the space and the public can watch them do it. Work is shown and sold. Openings, talks, workshops, live painting and music run out of it. Every few months the artist changes and the whole thing becomes new again, so someone who came in March has a reason to return in June.
And because artists bring their own communities, and musicians bring theirs, the audience is not manufactured. It arrives with the program.
Melbourne Central, where ART AID began. Curated and produced by ART AID, with art direction and design by Eddie Zammit.
The Rocks: bringing Sydneysiders back
Placemaking NSW came to us with a brief that had nothing to do with vacancy. The pandemic had emptied The Rocks of the Sydneysiders who loved it, and Placemaking NSW wanted them back.
Our Sydney launch was at 140 George Street, where Claire Foxton painted the store and we showed the work of more than sixty artists. We ran music events in-store and on the street. The space was warm and it was beautiful, and it was full of people who had not been to The Rocks in years.
It worked well enough that Placemaking NSW effectively handed us the keys to whichever empty tenancy we wanted next. We took two more sites, both heritage listed, and transformed them beyond anything they had held before, with an event called ONE Sydney across three levels at 47 George Street, and with Jeremy Kay's first ever solo show at Bay 43.
Every one of those events brought our community, and the communities of every artist and musician we hosted. That is the part an activation brief cannot buy and a residency gets for free.
Claire Foxton, 140 George Street. ART AID's Sydney launch, with Placemaking NSW.
Sofles at ONE Sydney, 47 George Street. Ten days across three heritage levels, with an outdoor mural gallery running simultaneously at Darling Quarter.
Jeremy Kay's first solo show, Bay 43, The Rocks.
200 George Street: completing a premium asset
After a year in The Rocks we moved to 200 George Street, home to Mirvac and EY, and one of the city's landmark commercial buildings. A tenancy on its doorstep had been sitting empty for some time, and an empty ground floor tells the street a different story to the one the building is telling.
We opened with Georgia Hill, in a gallery fit-out built to a standard any architect walking past would recognise. The building felt whole again.
Over the following year we hosted five artists. We worked with Mirvac on Mardi Gras and NAIDOC Week in the main lobby, at the heart of their brand, well outside the pop-up itself. And when a prospective tenant came to one of our events and saw the tenancy in full flight, they told us they wanted the space. We passed them on to the Mirvac partnerships team, and the space converted at full rate.
That is worth being precise about, because it is the opposite of how these things are usually sold. Leasing was never the objective. The tenant opportunity came because the space was alive and showing off its full potential.
200 George Street is also where we raised much of the money that built a school in Denpasar, through art sales across the residencies.
ART AID has been an absolute pleasure to work with. The vibrancy, activity and visitation they have brought to the precinct through their stunning, constantly evolving gallery has been felt by the whole community at 200 George Street.
Nyi Nyi Maung
Sales Manager, Brands and Experiences, Asset Management, Mirvac
Georgia Hill, 200 George Street, Sydney.
Glenfiddich x Jordan Gogos, 200 George Street, Sydney.
David Bromley, 200 George Street, Sydney.
Collins Place: from one tenancy to an entire precinct
Mirvac then took the program to Melbourne, giving us a vacant tenancy beside the Sofitel at Collins Place for a year, and three residencies ran through it with Jason Parker, Tommy Day III and Sahil Roy.
This is where the model showed what it can really do, because the work explored sites well beyond the tenancy. We curated temporary artworks across the precinct, from lift interiors to stair artworks and banners. We designed co-branded merchandise given free to customers once they spent a threshold with precinct retailers, so the art was directly moving retail. We curated a live screen-printing activation in the lobby and ran painting workshops.
We also curated NAIDOC Week again, the second year running for a Mirvac asset. Different artist, different stories.
The tenancy was never the destination. It was where the creative capacity lived while it worked on everything else.
Tommy Day III (Jirri Jirri), YARKEEN. Collins Place, Melbourne.
Tommy Day III (Jirri Jirri) passed away in 2026. ART AID acknowledges his family and community, and is honoured to have worked with him. YARKEEN stands as part of his legacy.
Sahil Roy painting live in the tenancy, Tapestry. Collins Place, Melbourne.
A collaboration, not a supply arrangement
Twelve residencies, three clients, more than a hundred artists and Mirvac ran eight of them, across two cities.
It only works as a collaboration, and there are four parties in it.
The precinct. Vitality, visitation, a year of programming rather than a run of one-off moments, campaign content made by people who know the place, and a calendar that stops being a procurement exercise. Press follows because a residency is a story where an activation is only an announcement. We have been covered by Time Out Sydney, in their guide to the best places to buy art in the city, with ONE covered in its own right, and by Urban List for both the Sydney pop-up and the Glenfiddich activation.
The artists. Paid work, and a solo show in a space built to premium retail standard, in front of an inner city audience that may never have encountered their work before.
The community. A place to spend an hour or two, open to anyone, with a different offering every few months.
The causes. Batyr, the youth mental health organisation. Women and Girls Emergency Centre. Indigenous Literacy Foundation. Mahboba's Promise. Bali Life Foundation, whose school in Denpasar these residencies helped build. Individual residencies have raised ten thousand dollars, and more, and there have been many others beyond these.
ART AID is a business that adds an enormous amount of value to the culture and vibrancy of the cities they deliver projects in. ART AID lead projects that deliver commercial impact for charities and causes, whilst providing a platform for Australian artists to showcase their works in innovative ways.
Ash Nicholson
Director, Government & Industry, CBRE
Every program is built differently
The Rocks needed its locals back. 200 George Street needed to feel complete. Collins Place needed a year of programming that reached every corner of the precinct. Each one was built around the objective, and the objective decided everything above it.
The commercial models varied just as much. Most clients engage us directly to program the space. Glenfiddich was a co-production, where the brand funded the activation and ART AID produced it alongside them. Campari was a sponsorship in kind, donating stock and funding a speakeasy bar that traded across the ten days of ONE.
And underneath all of it is work nobody sees. Two of our three Rocks tenancies were heritage listed, which changes what can be fixed to a wall, what can be lit and what has to be reversible. Services, power, access, insurance, base build condition, make-good. What a space can carry, and what it costs to hand back. Settled before the concept, not after, because a residency that cannot be built is just a good idea.
If you have a vacant tenancy, a precinct that has gone quiet, or an activation budget you are not sure is working hard enough, this is the work ART AID leads. Artist residency programs built around what your precinct actually needs, from curatorial strategy and artist selection through to design, production, programming and delivery. We would love to talk.
Part of a series on temporary art in the built environment. The previous piece looked at hoarding artworks, and why leading developers commission rather than comply.
Residency programs curated and produced by ART AID with Melbourne Central, Placemaking NSW and Mirvac. Art direction and design by Eddie Zammit across select projects. Collins Place photography by James Bugg, One Sydney photography by Nicole Reed.
ART AID is a public art and cultural consultancy working at the intersection of art, community, and place. To find out more about our work visit art-aid.co or follow @artaidau.
