Art exhibitions to see in Sydney this week

It was more than four decades ago that journalist and anti-development activist Juanita Nielsen disappeared from the streets of Sydney. Nobody knows exactly what happened to her, but it’s believed she met a violent end due to her opposition to the development of Victoria Street, where tenants were being evicted to make way for more apartment blocks. And the possible theories about her fate are wild; one is that she’s buried under the runway at Sydney Airport. So it only makes sense to approach this unusual story in an unusual fashion, which is exactly what Sydney artist Zanny Begg does in this documentary film having its local premiere for Sydney Festival. The Beehive stitches together documentary footage, recreations and other film shot by Begg (Pamela Rabe plays a narrator), but the fabric of this stitching together is determined by a randomised computer algorithm. Each screening lasts somewhere between 20 and 33 minutes, and there are 1,344 possible ways it could turn out.

To try to encapsulate Amrita Hepi’s fast-evolving, still relatively young career – which has dance at its core – with a neat label feels reductive. She’s performed as a dancer around the world, created performance art, taught empowering and joyous Beyoncé-inspired dance classes at Goodgod nightclub (RIP), given an insightful TED Talk about the politics of dance, and created a series of dance films for ASOS. She's also staged a unique series of collaborative one-on-one dance classes at Arts Centre Melbourne. But Hepi was still shocked when the hugely influential American conceptual artist Adrian Piper (one of Hepi's art world heroes) agreed to have her work shown alongside Hepi's in this exhibition at Cement Fondu. Both artists use dance to explore politics and identity, and they do so in a series of engrossing video installations. Read our interview with Amrita Hepi.

American artist Nick Cave – not to be confused with the Australian singer-songwriter – is bringing 16,000 wind spinners, 24 chandeliers, 10 miles of crystals, thousands of ceramic birds and one crocodile to Sydney. Cave’s Until is a mammoth new installation work coming to Carriageworks from November 23 2018. It will be open until March 2019, so you’ve got plenty of time to explore every nook and cranny of this extraordinarily detailed, opulent, kitschy world. Cave is best known for his ‘soundsuits’: brightly colourful, full-body costumes covered in noise-making materials made of everything from dyed human hair to plastic buttons. He made his first soundsuit in 1992, as a response to the Rodney King bashing, and in late 2016 brought a herd of horse-shaped soundsuits to Carriageworks for a memorable performance parade. While the soundsuits aren’t the focus of Until (although one has crept in), a visit to the installation is a little like stepping inside the belly of Cave’s creations. Thousands of small found objects have been pulled together to create three major spaces full of surprising colours and textures. At the centre of this all is a huge hanging crystal cloud, topped with a beautiful “private garden”. You can climb one of four ladders for a peek into this secret world, complete with its own crocodile, golden gilded pigs and blackface lawn jockeys. If those jockeys seem like an unusual addition, there’s a strong political slant to all of the work by Cave, who has

The Museum of Contemporary Art has closed the doors on one of its most successful exhibitions ever, Pipilotti Rist: Sip My Ocean. The blockbuster show, featuring large-scale light, video works and installations, was a veritable explosion of colour and became a social media sensation over the summer, with 110,000 people visiting and Instagramming their way through.  But for next year's big summer exhibition, the MCA is changing directions drastically and presenting an exhibition of mostly black-and-white photos by South African photographer David Goldblatt.  If you're not part of the visual arts or photography worlds, you probably won't have heard of Goldblatt, whose images have traced the changing face of South Africa from the start of apartheid at the end of the 1940s through to 1991, when it was dismantled. But MCA director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor says most hadn't heard of Pipilotti Rist before her exhibition, the MCA's contribution to this summer's Sydney International Art Series, which had previously had exhibitions from heavyweights like Anish Kapoor, Yoko Ono and Grayson Perry. Macgregor describes the Rist exhibition as a big risk that paid off. "We really were a little concerned about it," she says. "It's not a name with a wide resonance outside of the art world – but how wrong were we?" Macgregor is hoping that the MCA will be able to attract a similar audience of people under 35 to engage with Goldblatt's work, but she says it will be a significant challenge gi

The Art Gallery of NSW's Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age attracted 130,000 people last summer, showcasing works from the 17th century held by Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. For this summer (2018-19), the AGNSW is travelling east and skipping forward a few centuries with 65 paintings from St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum. There are more than 3 million items held in the Hermitage – and most aren't on permanent display – so picking works for a single exhibition is a bit of a tough ask. But this exhibition, called Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage (October 13 to March 3 2019), focuses on works from the late 19th century and the early 20th century, showing the evolution from impressionism to modernism. And we're not getting dusty and forgotten works from the gallery's store spaces: almost all are currently on display at the Hermitage. (AGNSW director Michael Brand says you might want to delay any trip you may have planned to St Petersburg from October through March if you're wanting to see modern art – many of the Hermitage's best works will be in Sydney.) There are eight works by Picasso, including his 'Woman with a Fan', and eight by Matisse. There's also work from Monet, Cézanne, Kandinsky and Gauguin, and one of Russian artist Malevich's highly influential 'Black Square' paintings. The exhibition will have a strong focus on French art from the 1910s, when Russian collectors Sergei Shchukin were Ivan Morozov collecting the most groundbreaking modern art in Paris. The e

Just one day before it was due to premiere in Melbourne in 2018, Sydney duo Soda_Jerk's latest film lost the support of the philanthropic trust that contributed $100,000 to its development. Soda_Jerk (aka Dan and Dominique Angelero) didn't lose the money they used to produce Terror Nullius, but the Ian Potter Cultural Trust no longer wanted to be associated with the promotion or publicity of a film that they deemed too controversial.  So what exactly sent the trust running for cover? The film splices together classic pieces of Australian cinema into a political revenge fable that challenges Australian mythology. Expect to see Pauline Hanson alongside the characters of Mad Max while the voice of John Howard rings out across the desert. Characters from Muriel's Wedding meet Josh Thomas in Please Like Me, Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper, and even the Babadook. Terror Nullius is the centrepiece of this exhibition, which features work from 20 living Australian artists working with satire and alternative narratives, and questioning what it is to be Australian. There's also work from Vincent Namitjira, Tony Albert, Abdul Abdullah, Cigdem Aydemir, Karla Dickens, Joan Ross and more.

The MCA's collection hang is where you go to get an overview of Australian contemporary art – and it's less daunting than it sounds. The last time they curated the hang was in 2012 (MCA Collection: Volume One), for the launch of the re-designed building, so there are a whola lotta new eye-candies to wrap your brain around.  Although several works in the first room of the exhibition do take 'time' as their theme (including Stuart Ringholt's giant clock) curator Natasha Bullock, who masterminded the new hang, says the theme is more broadly connected to the ways in which the works in the show connected to histories of different kinds.  Bullock deliberately messed with the Western linear notion of time in the exhibition's title, and explains that the indigenous concept of time would be better visualised in a circular pattern, in which present, future and past are connected. Artists in Today Tomorrow Yesterday include: Vernon Ah Kee, James Angus, Barbara Cleveland Institute (formerly Brown Council), John Barbour, Gordon Bennett, Daniel Boyd, Pat Brassington, Bob Burruwal, A.D.S Donaldson, Mikala Dwyer, Dale Frank, Marco Fusinato, Matthys Gerber, Kevin Gilbert, Julia Gorman, Fiona Hall, Robert Hunter, Robert MacPherson, Sanné Mestrom, Frank Malkorda, Linda Marrinon, Elizabeth Mipilanggurr, Callum Morton, Barayuwa Munungur, John Nixon, Kerrie Poliness, Stuart Ringholt, Joan Ross, Super Critical Mass, Gareth Sansom, Sally Smart, Ricky Swallow, Kathy Temin, Imants Tillers, Tjanpi D

You’re probably familiar with John Everett Miliais’ 1851 painting, ‘Ophelia’, even if you don’t know it. The image has come up time and again in the 16 decades since it was revealed to the public. It even served as inspiration for Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue’s music video, ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, in which Kylie mimics Ophelia’s watery pose. The painting is one of the centrepieces of Love & Desire: Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate, a new exhibition opening on December 14 at the National Gallery of Australia. We’ve all heard of the Tate Modern museum, but its larger, older sibling, the Tate Britain was originally founded in 1897, by sugar magnate Sir Henry Tate. It houses a substantial collection of art made in the UK, stretching right back to Tudor times. This Canberra exhibition explores the differing styles of the artists, the importance of draughtsmanship, and the collaborative work involved in the applied arts central to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. It features 40 of Tate Britain's best-loved works, alongside a further 40 loans from British and Australian collections.   The movement was formed in 1848 by a group of English painters, poets and art critics. Known for rejecting the art establishment of the era, the rebellious group also despised the mundanity of the everyday. These angsty artists adopted a radical style, painting directly from the motif in bright, clear colours, and building each form in thin layers with small brushes. Newly-minted NGA d

Brett Whiteley was known for a few things: his boldly colourful, world-conquering paintings; his provocative sculptures; and not least, his often tumultuous personal life. But despite the fact that he could sometimes be divisive, the art world is pretty united in its opinion of his drawing skills: he was one of the best. This exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW celebrates the central role of drawing in pretty much everything he did, including in paintings and sculptures. Thanks to his long association with the gallery – which continues through his wife and creative partner Wendy Whiteley – there'll be an absolute treasure trove on display, starting with his earliest sketches and traversing the many decades of his career, taking in landscapes, portraits and nudes.