About:

Jason Maling is an Aotearoa (NZ) born, Naarm (Melbourne) based artist, working across live performance, sculpture, social practice, and experimental public art. For over 25 years, he has devised projects that transform how we gather, play, and make meaning together.

His work centers on the art of the welcome and the choreography of agency - how we invite people, sites, objects, and sometimes whole communities into playful encounters where new forms of relation can emerge. Often humorous, sometimes deeply affecting, his works operate at the porous edge between art and everyday life, where a conversation, game, ritual, or fleeting gesture can shift our state of being within the systems we inhabit.

Maling’s projects have been staged in unexpected public sites across Australia and internationally. Recent works range from underground cosmologies (Diagrammatica), to sound system summits (Heavy Congress), flea markets of backstories (Single Channel Video), to long-form community rituals (The Keeper).

He is the founder of Strange Engine, a philanthropic initiative supporting ambitious unconventional projects, and a founding member of Field Theory, the award-winning public art collective whose long-form works have redefined the role of art in civic and social space.

Maling holds an MFA from the Slade School, UCL and a PhD from Deakin University, Melbourne.