Councillor Don Palmer Providing Local Leadership & Working for You

The annual SALA festival kicks off this week and culminates on August 25 at the Unley Shopping Centre



August is art month in South Australia and you’re invited. Since its inception in 1998 the annual SALA Festival has celebrated and promoted the diverse talents of South Australian Living Artists.
SALA is an innovative open access visual arts festival presenting thousands of artists through unique collaborations and exhibitions in hundreds of exhibition spaces throughout metropolitan and regional South Australia.
The SALA Festival is a truly unique state wide celebration of the visual arts and it is absolutely free.

The City of Unley are now in our 6th year of involvement with our brand of SALA in Unley. Building on our success of expanding the venues and artists (which earned us an Australian Business Arts Foundation (ABAF) Good Practice award for South Australia in 2009), we have this year diversified our involvement with SALA Festival generally.
 2013 SALA in Unley has continued to grow as one of South Australia’s major and respected arts festivals. This year SALA runs from 2-25 August. This year our involvement includes:
  • The coordination of Where Business Meets Art, a project developed in conjunction with Unley’s five Main Street Traders Associations for businesses and artists to participate in our ongoing initiative to put art in our shops, cafes and businesses. This year over 50 businesses will display work in a variety of mediums from around 120 artists. This continues to be the single largest response to SALA in any metropolitan area.
  • SALA on Show is the new SALA on Sale on Sunday 25 August starting around 10.30am and going to 5pm.! Following the decision of the King William Road Traders not to repeat the format of previous SALA on Sales, negotiations were undertaken with both SALA Festival and the Unley Shopping Centre. It was considered that the event was an excellent showcase for our Council and its region and with 6-8 000 attendees it should not be lost from the calendar. The event has been re-branded and now called SALA on Show. This is the closing event for the state-wide Festival. The event predominantly allows over 300 pieces of work to be sold by artists in one day.  It will be hosted in an area in front of the Unley Shopping Centre and the music and ‘artists on the street’ elements will spill over on to the paths of the Shopping Centre and the Soldiers Memorial Gardens.  We are currently investigating a temporary mural being created along one of the marquee walls. There will also be roving entertainers assisting with any traffic management issues. The Art Gallery of SA will be bringing workshops for families based on their current Heartland exhibition. 

    • We have been part of the ERA Arts and Culture portfolio to produce a touring curated exhibition under the theme of The ERA we live in. 21 artists have produced work after submitting expressions of interest. Five of these come from the Unley area. The exhibition opens at Prospect Gallery and will be there for August during SALA. It will come to the Hughes Gallery in March 2014 where we will organise a small opening with a couple of artist talks. The exhibition comes with a catalogue sponsored by the Watson group. This exhibition will be promoted on our website and via a ¼ page ad in the SALA program.
    We hope you will be able to take the time to get out and explore the world of visual arts in August and check out our exciting and diverse projects. 

    As Robert Hannaford said at the launch of the SALA Festival, and I paraphrase:

    “Artists can see differently. They assess the shape, size and tone of their subject and then the beauty is revealed. Art is all a trick by artists [to help us]…navigate the future”

    Enjoy what our artists see in Unley!