A Bengaluru mural collective and a Beijing dance company are headed for Asia TOPA Radar: Come Together on 26 November.
Asia TOPA Radar: Come Together is the latest edition of the triennial’s talks and ideas series, set for Arts Centre Melbourne with Aravani Art Project and YING Dance Theatre at the top of the bill.
The night centres on how collectives make art together, giving audiences a look at artists who are developing work for the next festival. Indonesian-Australian arts collective Nongkrong also joins the lineup, bringing music, food and dance.
Asia TOPA Radar: Come Together
- 26 November 2026
- Arts Centre Melbourne, 100 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
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Based in Bengaluru, Aravani Art Project is a collective of transgender and cisgender women artists who have spent more than 10 years making large-scale public murals, plus canvases, textile installations and performance. Their walls put transgender communities in India in plain view, drawing on mythology, cultural memory and the women’s own lives. The collective works with transgender women from the most marginalised end of that community, many pushed into begging or sex work by systemic exclusion, for whom art is a way to earn a living as much as a claim on creative and public life. Its work has shown at the Venice Biennale, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Warsaw’s Zachęta National Gallery of Art and the Biennale of Lenggries in Germany, along with a solo exhibition at Gallery XXL in Mumbai.
YING Dance Theatre was founded in Beijing by Yu Jinying, Hu Jing, Wu Yiwei and Han Chengpu. Traditional Chinese culture sits at the root of the company’s work, which mixes classical choreography with contemporary art, multimedia and other disciplines to dig into folklore, ritual, love, mortality, time and nature. A lot of it plays out in public space, built around how dancers move through a site with the audience in it. Since 2018 the company has performed across China and at South Korea’s Gwangju Fringe Festival.
Both collectives are spending two weeks in Naarm around the event, meeting local artists and communities and exploring the city as research for new work. Nongkrong, meanwhile, is back after staging an event at the 2025 festival. The next full Asia TOPA lands in 2028, following a 2025 edition that drew 750,000 people and brought 410 artists from 17 countries to Melbourne.
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