Things to do in Sydney today

For two weeks every spring, hordes of Sydneysiders head to the beach for the annual Sculpture by the Sea exhibition, which covers two kilometres of the city's most exquisite coastline, from Bondi to Tamarama. But the crowds can be pretty intense, and even if you're willing to brave them, most Sydneysiders are pretty busy – two weeks isn't really long enough for us to catch anything. For almost nine months, Casula Parklands is playing host to a new sculpture walk, featuring eight works from Sculpture by the Sea. Visitors will be able to follow the sculptures along the banks of the Georges River, starting at Casula Powerhouse. One of the key works you'll encounter on the walk is Southern Highlands sculptor David Ball's 'Celest', which stood proud on Tamarama Beach at this year's Sculpture by the Sea. The imposing corten steel sculpture will be installed in Casula for the duration of the sculpture walk.

Ten leading contemporary artists from China and Australia are coming together for this free exhibition exploring Chinese mythology through a variety of forms. The exhibition is curated by Glenfield-based artist Guan Wei, who last year became the first Chinese-Australian artist to have a solo exhibition at the MCA, and Beijing-based performance artist Cang Xin. Traditional and contemporary forms come smashing together, with artists including Amy Fu, Gu Xiaoping, Jiang Zhe, Palla Jeroff, Yang Jinsong, Yang Xifa, Zhang Jin and Jin Sha.

Billionaire art collector Judith Neilson’s Chippendale haven for Chinese art is continuing its tenth anniversary celebrations this year with a new exhibition of works collected over the course of the last decade. You’ll be able to walk through Zhu Jinshi’s ‘The Ship of Time’, a huge tunnel crafted from 14,000 sheets of xuan rice paper and 1,800 pieces of bamboo, and see Ai Weiwei’s former studio assistant Zhao Zhao’s ‘Constellations’, a confronting seven-panel silk embroidery. For film fans, there’s an acclaimed three-channel video installation by Liu Chuang, which brings found and filmed footage smashing together with recognisable cinematic references to explore what it means to be displaced and alienated.

Artexpress has now been running for 36 years, showing the best works submitted by high school art students for their HSC. And let's face it – it's pretty much every serious HSC art student's dream to make it into this exhibition and have their work shown at our city's biggest gallery. The artworks on display this year include sculpture, drawing, painting, graphic design and photo media. It always comes as a surprise as to just how high the standard is; the extraordinary technical skill of some of the students will make plenty of adults jealous. And while there mightn't always be a fully formed artistic vision, the works that make it into the exhibition are usually appropriately bold.

When shattered lives are reduced to numbers on paper, it’s hard to grasp the scale of human misery in war zones and the resultant need to flee with family. It’s all too easy to demonise those whom you cannot see. But put a face to these people, to the shattered places they leave behind, listen to their stories and it’s much harder to turn a blind eye. Particularly if those faces belong to adorable kids just trying to make the most of what little they have.   That’s what’s so powerful about Bow Echo, the new video installation from interdisciplinary artist Aziz Hazara. Exploring the relationship between young people and the sites of trauma that have become their playground, it’s searing stuff presented at the MCA. Based between Kabul, in his home country of Afghanistan, and the much more peaceful Ghent, Belgium, Hazara has an eye for what grasps you. Having recently completed residencies at the Embassy of Foreign Artists in Geneva (2018) and at the KHOJ International Artists’ Association in New Delhi (2017) he's a thrilling artist to keep an eye on.

Make do and mend takes on a new meaning for Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, who commandeers hessian sacks originally used by the Ghana Cocoa Board and then re-purposed by charcoal sellers, turning them into his canvas. With their textural brown surface traced by countless histories, marking out traders and trade routes to far-flung destinations, with colonial narratives contained within, they're an inherently fascinating medium that Mahama then supersizes by sewing them together. He'll perform a similar transformation with the towering interior of Cockatoo Island's Turbine Hall, adorning it with stitched sacks in a colossal work that brings his typically exterior work indoors. Enveloped by these rough and ready means of transporting goods, he asks us to think long and hard about how they came to be here, who did the hard yards for us and the histories wrapped up in our larger colonial narrative. For a slightly smaller scale but nonetheless big-picture work, Mahama will also show A Grain of Wheat at Artspace – an immersive installation of 400 first aid stretchers from the Second World War, collected from a site near a refugee camp outside Athens.

Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens is an artistic force to be reckoned with, exploring themes of gender, sexuality and spirituality alongside race. Her collage-driven practice – which also extends to sculpture, painting and photography ­– tackles the essence of self at the intersection of these lines. Her rigorous process often sees her break up and re-use existing works, remaking them in inherently fascinating ways, also incorporating the abandoned bric-a-brac of everyday life she up-cycles. One of the highlights of our homegrown First Nations creatives showing work at the Biennale, the Lismore-based artist will inhabit the sandstone vestibule the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The colonial architecture will accommodate her new work A Dickensian Circus for the duration of the festival. Exposing the dark history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were forced to perform in masks under the big top, the piece also echoes of the sky-high rates of incarceration of our Indigenous peoples today.

Revered Aboriginal elder, artist and Pitjantjatjara man Kunmanara ‘Mumu Mike’ Williams, whose prolific work poured out of the Mimili Maku Arts Centre he helped found in the APY lands in South Australia, sadly passed away late last year. Renowned for his subversive messaging scrawled on Australia Post bags, as inspired by a pile left at Mimili Maku, challenging whitefella’s political status quo and treatment of Aboriginal Australians and creating more agency for Anangu artists was at the heart of his work. He was a tireless activist who fought long and hard in the APY Land Rights movement that ultimately led to the signing of the Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act 1981. You might have caught his most recent masterpiece Kamantaku Tjukurpa wiya (The Government Doesn't have Tjukurpa) at the MCA recently as part of the National. Now a fitting tribute to his remarkable life and work, the Art Gallery of NSW will play host to this his final protest piece lighting the way with his words "Kulilaya munuya nintiriwa" (Listen and learn from us). The Mimili Maku Arts collective stepped in to complete it, following the vision he laid out, as led by his beloved widow Tuppy Ngintja Goodwin (Pitjantjatjara, Arrernte) and best friend and Sammy Dodd (Pitjantjatjara).

Multi-disciplinary Peruvian artist Fátima Rodrigo Gonzalez corrals sculpture, drawing and video work to examine the impact of modernism and colonialism on Latin American art, architecture and pop culture. Melding these ideas with an exploration of gender identity, she takes nothing for granted, subverting and queering the status quo. Interrogating violence against women and non-binary people, she also questions the cultural appropriation of consumer culture, including our fast fashions. What does modernity mean? And how does that relate to the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised? Gonzalez will get you thinking in this Artspace with a new exhibition of exciting work, which recreates the iconic set from beloved1960s Latin TV show Sabado Gigante (Gigantic Saturday).

Starting life as an art therapy program supporting Aboriginal men facing alcohol and substance addiction, run by the Anyinginyi Aboriginal Health Organisation, the Tennant Creek Brio (from the Italian word for vivacious life) has taken on a life of its own. Guided by artists Rupert Betheras, Fabian Brown, Joseph Williams, Jimmy Frank and David Duggie, many local men have embraced the healing positivity of the project, growing so popular that the Brio boys now live at Nyinkka Nyunyu, Tennant Creek’s dedicated art and culture centre. Fusing Aboriginal desert traditions with abstract expressionism, street art and art activism and a love of repurposing junk, a rebel streak underpins each artist’s work, and a desire to shake up the status quo.

South African filmmaker and photographer Zanele Muholi’s work is intrinsically wrapped up in the fight for the rights of the LGBTIQ+ people whose lives she documents. The challenges and injustices they still face are at stark odds with the dream of equality post-Apartheid. The MCA’s celebration of her proud and powerful visual art encompasses three bodies of ongoing work. Faces and Phases’ black-and-white portraits of lesbian, trans and gender non-conforming people kicked off months before the Civil Union Act legalised same-sex marriage in South Africa in 2006. She has captured some 500-plus people. Brave Beauties zooms in on a stunning series of trans women, particularly those who have competed in community-based beauty pageants. Marking South Africa’s 20th anniversary of democracy in 2014, it highlights the stark contrast for these women who are far too often the subject of violent crime.   And pointing the camera at herself, Somnyama Ngonyama documents Muholi’s many travels across the globe in the line of duty. “I’m producing this photographic document to encourage people to be brave enough to occupy space, brave enough to create without fear of being vilified,” she says. “To teach people about our history, to re-think what history is all about, to re-claim it for ourselves, to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.” 

Have you ever wondered what the inside of the majestic, multi-coloured dome of Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building looks like? You’re in luck. It'll re-open to the public exclusively for an ethereal, ghostly contemporary art piece by renowned performer Brian Fuata.  Fuata will take over the space as part of the Biennale of Sydney, a multi-dimensional, vibrant celebration of all things art which is popping up in all sorts of unusual locations around the city. This spooky, interpretive piece has taken Fuata to international stages in the past, and this time it’ll tap into the heritage building’s own eerie history. Did you know there have been ghost sightings inside the QVB? Fuata’s performance is capped at just 15 people per show, so you'll get the intimacy to take in the brilliance of his art, and the space to appreciate the architecture of the magnificent dome.   Free tickets are available now for the two sessions on Saturday, April 11, and the tickets to the performances on April 18 will go live on Monday, March 16.