Things to do in Sydney today

With a focus on up-and-coming designers, this vibrant exhibition gives creatives from diverse fields the opportunity to showcase works together for the first time. Designing Bright Futures is an exhibition curated by Australian Design Centre in partnership with UNSW Art & Design. It brings together textile, jewellery, graphic, object, interactive and spatial designers in a visual mixing bowl that celebrates the optimism and ambitions of a generation of creatives. The show will feature 12 young designers whose careers are just kicking into gear, giving them the opportunity to consider their crafts outside of any commercial spheer. They'll be able to consider the role of creativity in a modern context defined by issues like climate change, social inequalities, aging populations and the importance of Indigenous heritage. The works will be on display at the Australian Design Centre from November 22 for two months.

Sydney's ANZAC Memorial has just relaunched after a million-dollar revamp, and is kicking off its new era with this exhibition of 12 Australian artists, who all recently visited the World War I battlefields of the western front. They've all created new works in response to their experiences on the site and their own personal histories. The artists are: Deidre Bean, Harrie Fisher, Paul Ferman, Michelle Hiscock, Ross Laurie, Steve Lopes, Euan MacLeod,  Ian Marr, Idris Murphy, Amanda Penrose Hart, Luke Sciberras and Wendy Sharpe. The exhibition, which commemorates the 100th anniversary of the ceasefire on the western front, was curated by Brad Manera.

Australia's major galleries always draw in their biggest audiences with blockbuster exhibitions of artworks brought in from across the world. But many of them have extraordinary artworks hidden away in their own collections, and regularly curate those rarely seen pieces in new and intriguing ways. Those exhibitions can be every bit as rewarding as the major blockbusters – and they're nearly always free, like this one is. Compass is curated by the Museum of Contemporary Art's Clothilde Bullen, who's responsible for the gallery's Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander collection. As you might expect, there's plenty of work by Indigenous artists in this small but punchy exhibition of women artists in the MCA's smaller first floor gallery. Highlights include Lorraine Connelly-Northey's 'Three rivers country', a huge sculpture of corrugated iron, tin and barbed wire that's a map of the Murrumbidgee, Lachlan and Macquarie Rivers, Frances Djulibing's 'Yukuwa' sculpture of cockatoo feathers and banyan tree bark, and three of Lindy Lee's "weather drawings": huge suspended scrolls that have been exposed to the elements and weathered in beautiful ways. You can also see Maria Kozic's 'Bitch', an early music video exploring how women are labelled and defined, and Gosia Wlodarczak's 'A Room Without a View', which documents a durational performance that the artist performed in Melbourne in 2019. It's made up of nine panels that made up a windowless box, in which she lived for 17 days. She

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

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

Every year, the Museum of Contemporary Art invites an artist or curator to take the reins of its Primavera exhibition, a showcase for artists under 35.  Beyond this, the format is flexible – how many artists and works one wants to program, and whether it is existing or new work, or a combination. That flexibility is the show’s greatest asset, allowing each artist-curator to put their stamp on the show – you might say that Primavera is as much an artwork as an exhibition of artworks. In 2018, the exhibition is being curated by the MCA's own assistant curator Megan Robson, who has pulled together eight artists to ask the question: why is identity important today? Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Hoda Afshar is presenting a 24-minute film work called 'Remain', made in collaboration with journalist Behrouz Boochani, who's being held on Manus Island. The film is part documentary, made up of footage of Manus and the asylum seekers who remain there following the closure of the detention centre in 2017. Sydney artist Caroline Garcia is showing two films, including her 2014 'Primitive Nostalgia', which uses green screen technology to cast herself into a series of different Hollywood dance sequences – including scenes from West Side Story and The King and I – that feature "exotic" depictions of people of colour. Sydney artist Jason Phu's 'The 5th Reincarnation of Sam Poo, Infamous Bushranger and the Mustard Horde: The Last Stand' is a large diorama about Australia's "only Chinese bus

Renowned for his arresting stop-motion video installations, William Kentridge is the best-known contemporary artist working in South Africa today. In this exhibition, curated by the artist himself, visitors can trace the development of his career, from his interest in opera and early cinema to his preoccupation with the nexus between art, ideology, history and memory as a witness to South Africa’s apartheid era. Highlights of the exhibition include one of Kentridge’s most ambitious and celebrated video installations, the eight channel 'I am not me, the horse is not mine 2008', which appeared as part of the 16th Biennale of Sydney on Cockatoo Island, as well as works across sculpture, film, charcoal, collage and tapestry, and a recreation of the artist’s studio. To coincide with the exhibition, Opera Australia will stage a new production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, directed and illustrated by Kentridge, at Sydney Opera House throughout January.