BSAF 2018.

By its third year, the Brisbane Street Art Festival had hit its stride, and the 2018 edition built directly on the momentum of 2017 to become the festival's biggest program yet. Held from 31 March to 15 April, BSAF 2018 again turned the streets of Brisbane into an open-air gallery, enlisting more than 200 artists by the festival's own count, armed with over 2000 cans of paint and working across more than 50 sites city-wide. At the heart of it sat an ambitious mural program of around fifty large-scale walls, roughly double the number painted the previous year, a leap that signalled just how firmly the event had embedded itself in Brisbane's cultural calendar.

The 2018 walls spread well beyond the inner city, reaching into South Brisbane, Spring Hill, Fortitude Valley, Paddington, Annerley and the CBD. One of the standout precincts was Fish Lane in South Brisbane, where Brisbane's own Sofles painted alongside Hong Kong's Bao Ho and Colombia's Gris One. The program leaned heavily on international exchange, drawing a contingent of overseas artists, several of them creating their first Australian works, including London geometric specialist Rosie Wood and Mexican calligraphy artist Said Dokins, who joined a deep local roster featuring Gus Eagleton, Fuzeillear, Emmanuel Moore, The Brightsiders, Drapl, Sindy Sinn, Shida and others.

Among the year's most resonant projects was Dokins' "Sleeping Languages in Queensland" series, made in collaboration with Digi Youth Arts under director Alethea Beetson. His QUT mural "Stories of a Word" gathered words and phrases from local community members across more than 200 square metres, while "The Lost River" in Bowen Hills wove roughly 125 Queensland Indigenous language names into a current of urban calligraphy, honouring Traditional Owners and the cultures and languages suppressed through displacement.

Beyond the murals, BSAF 2018 anchored its indoor program at the Brisbane Powerhouse, where the month-long "Within These Walls" group exhibition opened on 12 April, presenting works of every shape and size from dozens of local and international artists. The festival launched on 1 April with a free party in Fortitude Valley, complete with live music and mural painting, setting the tone for a run of nightly events that, in the festival's own words, offered a feast for the mind, ears, body and soul.