ARAVANI ART PROJECT and YING DANCE THEATRE Will Headline Asia TOPA Radar

Indian transgender and cisgender women artists from Aravani Art Project and leading Chinese contemporary dance artists from YING Dance Theatre will make their way to Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) next month to headline Asia TOPA Radar: Come Together at Arts Centre Melbourne on Thursday 26 November 2026.

As Asia TOPA's talks and ideas series, Radar: Come Together will explore collaborative art making and give exclusive access to some of the most exciting artistic collectives working throughout the Asia-Pacific today. Local heroes, the Indonesian-Australian arts collective Nongkrong, round out the lineup with an offering of music, food and dance.

Asia TOPA's Creative Director Jeff Khan said bringing the Aravani Art Project and YING Dance Theatre collectives to Naarm is an exciting step in the evolution of the next Asia TOPA festival:

'During our pre-festival years, Asia TOPA seeks out and connects with inspiring and extraordinary artists from all over the region, to create ideas for new work and develop that work into something special for our next festival.

We are delighted to welcome these two leading collectives from India and China, who have such unique visions for connecting with local communities and creating captivating art experiences where everybody is invited in.

Radar is a chance to meet these brilliant artists, hear how they have connected with Melbourne, and get a glimpse into their creative process.

We're also delighted to welcome back Nongkrong – who created such a memorable event in our last festival – to share a slice of Indonesian-Australian art and culture”

The Aravani Art Project is a collective of transgender and cisgender women artists based in Bengaluru, India creating beautifully vibrant public murals, canvas works, textile installations and performance-based art. Working with a methodology of friendship and art made not for the community, but with and by them — the collective has spent over a decade building a distinctive visual language rooted in the mythology, lived experience, and cultural memory of transgender communities in India.

That language began on the wall, with large-scale murals that reclaim public space as a site of transgender visibility, resilience, and collective storytelling. Over time their art has moved into the gallery, the installation space, and the festival ground — always carrying the same politics, the same insistence on being seen.

The collective works specifically alongside transgender women from the most economically marginalised sections of the community. Those pushed into begging and sex work by systemic exclusion, and for whom art represents both a source of livelihood and a right – to creativity, to leisure, to authorship, to public presence.

The art the women have created has been displayed around the world including Venice Biennale, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Biennale of Lenggries in Germany as well as a solo exhibition at Gallery XXL in Mumbai.

Found in Beijing, China by Yu Jinying, Hu Jing, Wu Yiwei, and Han Chengpu, YING Dance Theatre is a contemporary performance collective that centres their work on dance, alongside other interdisciplinary and multimedia art practices. Rooted in traditional Chinese culture and drawing from both contemporary art and traditional choreography, the collective explores universal themes including folklore, ritual, love, mortality, time, nature and the essence of existence.

Through a constant expansion of bodily language and visual narrative, the company has cultivated a highly experimental and immersive approach to contemporary performance. Their vision is to cultivate a distinctive aesthetic voice that resonates on the international stage.

Emphasising the dynamics between performer, space and audience YING Dance Theatre are committed to exploring the possibilities in artistic movement within the public space. Since 2018, the collective has travelled and performed to South Korea's Gwangju Fringe Festival and throughout China.

Alongside their appearance at Asia TOPA Radar, both collectives will spend two weeks in Naarm meeting local artists and communities, exploring spaces across the city and conducting local research toward the creation of their work. Both collectives have expressed their excitement to connect deeply with Melbourne's local cultural landscape.

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