Keeping the Work Alive: NotFair 2026 and a Lust for Life

 

Image credit: Portrait of Sam Leach. Photo courtesy of Philip Huynh. Portrait of Ashley Crawford, 2009. Photo courtesy of Sonia Payes.

 

As NotFair enters its eighth iteration, the exhibition does so under altered conditions. NotFair 2026, titled Lust for Life, unfolds in the wake of the loss of co-founder Ashley Crawford, a figure whose influence shaped not only the fair's ethos but also its insistence on risk, clarity, and artist-led conviction. Rather than positioning this edition as either tribute or rupture, Lust for Life operates as a continuation: a working exhibition grounded in Crawford’s appetite for ideas, and alert to the pressures shaping contemporary practice today.

The exhibition gathers 36 artists responding to a world increasingly structured by algorithms, speed, and systems of extraction. Set within the former headquarters of a sports analytics company in Prahran, the site itself becomes an active participant, a space once dedicated to measuring human performance, now repurposed for critical, artistic investigation.

In the following conversation, NotFair Chair Sam Leach reflects on Ashley Crawford's legacy, the curatorial logic of Lust for Life, and the role of contemporary art in navigating and resisting the conditions of the present.

“Contemporary art is not just reacting to the current moment, but actively testing it”
– Sam Leach

NotFair 2026 carries the dual weight of honouring Ashley Crawford while also addressing an art world in rapid transformation. How will this responsibility guide the fair?
They guide it in two ways. First, the tone. This edition is not a victory lap, and it is not a memorial show either. It is a working exhibition with a clear sense of who is missing and why the work still matters. Second, the programming. The theme is not “technology” as a novelty. It is the lived condition artists work within: attention economies, speed, extraction, and the pressure to constantly produce. Ashley’s influence keeps us pointed toward work with stakes, not just work with surface.

You've described Ashley as the "compass" of NotFair. In practical terms, what did that look like day to day, and how does his influence continue to guide the project now?
Day to day, it looked like judgement, clarity, and a kind of generous impatience. Ash could slice through pretension and get to the real question: what is the work doing, what is it risking, and does it hold up if you actually spend time with it?

He was also relentlessly supportive in practical ways. He’d write the piece, make the call, introduce the right people, bring people to shows, and keep backing artists long after the first flush of attention. NotFair came out of that same instinct: making a space for work we felt needed to be seen more widely.

The decision to retitle NotFair 2026 Lust for Life is deeply personal. Why did this story and this song feel like the right lens through which to remember Ashley?
Because it describes him accurately. “Lust for Life” isn’t polite optimism. It is appetite, curiosity, mischief, and a refusal to be dulled. That was Ash’s entire mode of being.

It is also literally part of his instructions. He wanted the song played at his funeral. He also had views on dying in Tibet and wanting a sky burial, which is very Ash: dark humour, a bit of theatre, and oddly practical about the details.

So the title lets us hold grief and momentum together. It gives the show permission to be alive, not reverent in a stiff way, and it remembers him as a force rather than a symbol.

Ashley championed art that was "dangerous, honest, and accessible." How do you see those values playing out in the 2026 exhibition?
“Dangerous” for us means the work is not safely pre-approved by taste or politics. It takes a risk, formally or socially, and it accepts the consequences. “Honest” means it does not pretend we are outside the systems we critique. Artists are not exempt from platforms, markets, or technology. “Accessible” does not mean simplified. It means the work meets you where you are; it does not require insider knowledge to begin.

The exhibition frames the art world as driven by algorithms, markets, and constant production. Is this exhibition a critique, an acceptance, or something more ambivalent?
It is closer to an investigation than a position statement. There is critique, because a lot of this is corrosive. There is also an acknowledgement, because this is the air we are all breathing. What matters is how artists respond: whether they amplify the churn, or slow it, redirect it, or expose its mechanics. The show holds those different responses rather than pretending there is one correct attitude.

You speak about a shift from the shock of AI to a more critical embrace. What distinguishes critical engagement with technology from novelty-driven use?
Novelty use tends to be tool-first and friction-free. Critical engagement is slower and more deliberate. It asks where the data comes from, what labour is hidden, what is being automated, and what is being lost or gained in perception and authorship. It also shows its workings, not necessarily in a didactic way, but in a way that makes the viewer aware of the system, not just the output.

How does the building itself inform the curatorial and artistic responses within it?
The site is not a neutral container. It was formerly the headquarters of a tech company that used GPS to track athletes, and it still reflects that logic in its layout and infrastructure. Artists are responding to that, sometimes using the building as an instrument, sometimes working against its managerial architecture. The fact that it’s a repurposed office complex also invites a particular kind of invention: temporary rooms, improvised circulation, and works that behave differently in corridors, meeting rooms, and at thresholds.

Many of the works engage with systems that quantify, measure, or consume human activity. Do you see contemporary artists reclaiming agency within these systems, or exposing their limits?
Both, and sometimes both at once. Some works hijack the apparatus, making it behave oddly, become poetic, or fail. Others show the limits of “measurement” as a worldview, what it can count and what it cannot. I don’t think artists are naïve about reclaiming agency. The stronger works tend to acknowledge the asymmetry of power while still insisting on the possibility of choice, refusal, or distortion.

NotFair has long prioritised artists who are "talked about by artists." Why is peer recognition still such a vital metric?
Because it is one of the few signals that comes from sustained attention rather than visibility. Artists see each other’s work up close and over time, in studios, art schools, installations, and long conversations, before it has a polished public narrative. That is often where you notice real momentum: a practice making an interesting turn, a formal problem being solved, or an artist committing to something over years rather than chasing the next trend. For NotFair, that peer conversation is a practical way to find work with substance early.

The curatorial team brings together distinct perspectives, including a strong focus on Indigenous knowledge systems. How do you see these grounding perspectives operating alongside or serving as a foundation for technologically driven works?

Having Indigenous knowledge systems in the curatorial frame changes what the show takes as its baseline. It keeps place, relationship, and responsibility present in the room, alongside the excitement and anxiety around new tools. That matters when some works are technologically driven, because it prevents the conversation from being only about technique and output, and brings it back to what is being engaged and on what terms.

It also puts pressure on the show’s relationship with extractive thinking. AI and networked systems run on ingestion. They absorb images, text, patterns, and context. With that in mind, you start asking more grounded questions. What is being used as source material and information? What is being trained on? What permissions exist? Who holds custody, and who benefits when cultural material circulates?

So those grounding perspectives are not an add-on. They set the conditions that make the technology-facing works more specific and more accountable to the realities they draw on.

There's an increasing collapse between art, design, fashion, and performance. Does this hybridity feel liberating, or does it risk diluting disciplinary depth?
Artists draw on design, fashion, performance, and software because those languages are part of how the world is built and mediated today. The question is whether those influences are structural, doing real work in the piece, or whether they remain at the level of reference.

When it works, the hybridity is not just visual. It changes how the work is made and how it behaves in the space, and it changes what the viewer must do to encounter it. The substance lies in the choices and constraints, not in the category.

Rebecca Diele is a good example because she treats the building as material, stitching copper wire into the walls and effectively weaving the site’s infrastructure into a textile practice. Karen Ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato sit on the seam between system, object, and performance, where the work behaves like an autonomous network as much as a sculpture.

For NotFair, we look for practices where the hybridity is integral to the work, not an overlay.

Ashley was known for cutting through art-world pretension. How do you personally navigate the tension between accessibility and intellectual rigour in an exhibition like this?
I navigate that tension as an exhibition problem as much as a writing problem. A show can be conceptually ambitious and still offer multiple entry points. You can come in through form, material, humour, discomfort, or a physical experience in the room, and then let the thinking catch up. The exhibition can be demanding, but it should reward attention rather than require insider knowledge.

The other part is the edit. Rigour comes from selecting work that can carry its complexity without being propped up, and from not forcing everything into a single message. That feels very Ashley to me. He did not simplify art; he made it accessible. He could cut through pretension, and he trusted audiences to meet difficult work when it was presented with care and without unnecessary fog.

NotFair runs alongside Melbourne Art Fair, yet positions itself as deliberately irreverent. What does NotFair offer that larger commercial ventures cannot?
NotFair is irreverent in the simple sense that it is not built around the transaction as the organising principle. It is an artist-led, curated exhibition across an entire site, so the show can prioritise where practices are going rather than what is easiest to sell.

That gives us room to do a few things larger commercial ventures struggle with. One is to treat the exhibition as a platform for advancing artists’ practices and careers, putting artists in front of peers, curators, audiences, and collectors without making sales the only measure of success. Another is the willingness to place unsellable or genuinely esoteric work alongside sellable work, without apologising for either. The mixture is the point. It is a more accurate picture of contemporary practice than a clean market presentation.

As NotFair enters this next chapter, what do you hope audiences feel emotionally and intellectually when they step into NotFair 2026?
I hope they feel awake. Emotionally, I hope there is energy, and also some tenderness, because Ashley’s absence is real, and the title is a way of keeping his presence in the room without turning it into a memorial plaque.

Intellectually, I hope people leave with a clear sense that contemporary art is not just reacting to the current moment but actively testing it. If someone walks out wanting to talk about a particular work, follow an artist they did not know before, or argue about what they just saw, that is a good outcome.