Hey, I’m just ducking down to Ace Mart…need anything?
Open early and running when you need it, Ace Mart has you covered. Come in for an energy drink, chewing gum or milk. Grab a coffee and a pastry from a local baker, pick up your festival tickets, mend the pants you tore getting low last night, catch a lift to your next thing, buy some merch, get some advice. Maybe leave having met an artist, a stranger, or a piece of art you weren't looking for…
Built by Ace House Collective (Yogyakarta) and RIFF RAFF ARI (Penrith), Ace Mart is your one-stop shop for festival and life essentials. Australian and Indonesian artworks sit on the shelves beside snacks and drinks. Cook up a feed and eat with whoever's around.
It's the festival heart, a box office, infopoint, a stop on IMMI Express bus route, a community noticeboard for tickets and lifts and whatever else needs sharing.
Local cobblers, keycutters, menders and makers take up residency across the weekend, so drop in for whatever repair or service you need. If we don’t have it, we'll help find someone local who does.
Drawn from two ideas Ace House has worked with for over a decade. Lumbung: collectivity, shared resource, mutual care. Nongkrong: being present with your community, no agenda, nowhere else you need to be. RIFF RAFF brings the same instinct for gathering to their community in Penrith.
Ace Mart is open to local artists, makers, musicians, performers, festival-goers, and anyone who needs something. It's a small gesture at an old idea: that a shop can be a commons, that time spent together is worth more than any version of it sold back to us, and that once upon a time we just asked each other for things.
Ace Mart is located within Civic Arcade.
Ace House Collective was founded in Yogyakarta in 2011 by young artists looking for something outside the gallery system, and opened a physical space in 2013. It's a non-profit, entirely volunteer-run — housed in a simple residential building with two exhibition rooms, tucked behind a café and surrounded by food stalls and coffee stands. No white cube. Art sits inside everyday neighbourhood life, not apart from it.
They run six to seven exhibitions a year, each up to six weeks long, showing painters, photographers, video artists, and mixed-media work from across Indonesia. Their approach draws heavily on youth and popular culture — music, graphic design, skate, street art — using the familiar as an entry point into harder conceptual and political conversations.