Things to do in Sydney today

Sri-Lankan born artist Ramesh Mario-Nithiyendran spent most of his formative years in Western Sydney and is finally having his first solo exhibition there. He’ll be bringing his distinctive sculptural style to Casula, with a series of works that subversively channel Hindu temple iconography and colonial public monuments, smashing together religious and cultural imagery with musings on gender, power, and sexual and racial identity.

Artexpress has now been running for 35 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. This year, 56 artworks were chosen from the 8,770 submitted for the 2018 HSC.

Sydney-based artist Janet Laurence has made a career as an “environmental artist”, creating installations that respond to and utilise the natural world as key artistic elements – and she's gained a significant following thanks to her unique style. This major survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art features installations, sculpture, photography and video, with key works from across the course of her 30-year career. When you walk into the MCA's first floor gallery, the first thing you'll notice is a giant tree that's been dragged into the museum, lying right in the middle of the floor. It's a tree that's died due to drought, but Laurence has bandaged up its joints in an act of healing. Immediately opposite is a display of live plants in handblown glass vessels – all endangered species from the rainforest, being kept on a kind of life support. This meeting of the natural world with scientific and medicinal imagery is key to Laurence's work. There's also 'Deep breathing: resuscitation for the reef', a work made for the Artists 4 Climate exhibition in Paris 2015, featuring specimens from the Great Barrier Reef on loan from natural history museums. There’s also a newly commissioned work at the centre of the exhibition called ‘Theatre of Trees’, all about the healing powers of plants. It's an otherworldly installation that's taken over the entire first floor northern gallery, with five-metre curtains printed with close-up photography of trees, projections, lighting and three sepa

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

The National is all about capturing a snapshot of where we are in Australia right now by bringing together contemporary artists from all across the country to three venues: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Carriageworks and the Art Gallery of NSW. Isobel Parker Philip is the curator for the AGNSW chapter of this year’s edition of the biennial festival and has focused on artists who work across diverse forms – sculpture, performance, video, installation, painting – but are all sensitive to the instability of the time in which we’re living. The bulk of the exhibition is in the gallery’s lower second level, but you can’t contain an exhibition as ambitious as this one. When you step into the AGNSW’s entry vestibule, you’ll meet Andrew Hazewinkel’s white busts representing a Western European male, covered in faultlines. If you venture through to the European 19th-century art gallery, you’ll find his large-scale video installation, which shows one of these busts being slowly ground down by a power tool. As you go further into the gallery’s entrance foyer, you’ll see Tom Polo’s brightly coloured, wall-filling paintings. On the other side is Izabela Pluta’s ‘Apparent Distance’, made up of underwater photographs printed onto giant sheets of draped fabric. There are a number of large-scale installations down in the lower second floor galleries, including Nicholas Folland’s sculptures made up of hanging pieces of found glass and crystal, arranged to look like clouds floating through

Before you even set foot inside Carriageworks, you see the first works from The National, Sydney’s biennial festival of Australian contemporary art. Both are intrinsically connected to the history of the site as a workshop for steam engines. Thom Roberts’ portraits of people – alongside the trains with whom they’re identified – hang as banners across a billboard to greet you at the Wilson Street entrance to Carriageworks. As you walk down the stairs towards the building, steam billows across the old tracks, creating a thick fog. This is Tom Múller’s installation, ‘Ghost Line’. It was important to curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham that the exhibition at Carriageworks – which features 18 contemporary artists from across the country – spilled out from the building and spoke to the site itself. That’s why, at the entrance to the exhibition space, there’s Sam Cranstoun’s ‘Utopia’ sculpture, inspired by Ken Done’s 1988 ‘Australia’ sculpture. As you venture inside, there are artworks that speak to popular culture, curious historical tales, and works that act as unlikely postcards from places and around the world. You can hop up on a platform in Nat Thomas’ ‘Postcards from the Edge’ and recreate a key scene from the Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine movie, and venture to the Arctic Circle in Mish Meijers and Tricky Walsh’s room-filling installation ‘The Crocker Land Expedition’, which imaginatively recreates a 1913 voyage in search of land that turned out to be a mirage. Tony Alber

At first you might think curators Clothilde Bullen and Anna Davis have failed to pull together a “harmonious” group of artworks at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition for The National, Sydney’s biennial festival of Australian contemporary art. But the pair would be the first to admit that they didn’t have “harmony” or homogeneity on their minds when they were curating the show. And how could they, when curating an exhibition with a title as ambitious as “The National” in a country as diverse as Australia? Instead, their chapter of The National is all about finding spaces where all our differences can exist side by side. So anybody searching for a singular, coherent perspective across the level three galleries at the MCA will be disappointed. Instead, there are 24 artists who come from all corners of the country – including several from regional and remote areas – and have all variety of experiences. One of the highlights and crowd favourites is Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s ‘Pretty Beach’, which features a simple but oversized crystal chandelier hanging over a school of grey stingrays swimming across the floor. Directly opposite is a large-scale painting by the late Kunmanara Mumu Mike Williams, which uses old Australia Post bags as canvases. Along a lengthy foyer are Kaylene Whiskey’s bright paintings depicting her pop-music heroes – Cher, Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson and Tina Turner – both in concert around the world and on imagined visits to her community in Indulkana

At first you might think curators Clothilde Bullen and Anna Davis have failed to pull together a “harmonious” group of artworks at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition for The National, Sydney’s biennial festival of Australian contemporary art. But the pair would be the first to admit that they didn’t have “harmony” or homogeneity on their minds when they were curating the show. And how could they, when curating an exhibition with a title as ambitious as “The National” in a country as diverse as Australia? Instead, their chapter of The National is all about finding spaces where all our differences can exist side by side. So anybody searching for a singular, coherent perspective across the level three galleries at the MCA will be disappointed. Instead, there are 24 artists who come from all corners of the country – including several from regional and remote areas – and have all variety of experiences. One of the highlights and crowd favourites is Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s ‘Pretty Beach’, which features a simple but oversized crystal chandelier hanging over a school of grey stingrays swimming across the floor. Directly opposite is a large-scale painting by the late Kunmanara Mumu Mike Williams, which uses old Australia Post bags as canvases. Along a lengthy foyer are Kaylene Whiskey’s bright paintings depicting her pop-music heroes – Cher, Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson and Tina Turner – both in concert around the world and on imagined visits to her community in Indulkana

The National is all about capturing a snapshot of where we are in Australia right now by bringing together contemporary artists from all across the country to three venues: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Carriageworks and the Art Gallery of NSW. Isobel Parker Philip is the curator for the AGNSW chapter of this year’s edition of the biennial festival and has focused on artists who work across diverse forms – sculpture, performance, video, installation, painting – but are all sensitive to the instability of the time in which we’re living. The bulk of the exhibition is in the gallery’s lower second level, but you can’t contain an exhibition as ambitious as this one. When you step into the AGNSW’s entry vestibule, you’ll meet Andrew Hazewinkel’s white busts representing a Western European male, covered in faultlines. If you venture through to the European 19th-century art gallery, you’ll find his large-scale video installation, which shows one of these busts being slowly ground down by a power tool. As you go further into the gallery’s entrance foyer, you’ll see Tom Polo’s brightly coloured, wall-filling paintings. On the other side is Izabela Pluta’s ‘Apparent Distance’, made up of underwater photographs printed onto giant sheets of draped fabric. There are a number of large-scale installations down in the lower second floor galleries, including Nicholas Folland’s sculptures made up of hanging pieces of found glass and crystal, arranged to look like clouds floating through

Before you even set foot inside Carriageworks, you see the first works from The National, Sydney’s biennial festival of Australian contemporary art. Both are intrinsically connected to the history of the site as a workshop for steam engines. Thom Roberts’ portraits of people – alongside the trains with whom they’re identified – hang as banners across a billboard to greet you at the Wilson Street entrance to Carriageworks. As you walk down the stairs towards the building, steam billows across the old tracks, creating a thick fog. This is Tom Múller’s installation, ‘Ghost Line’. It was important to curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham that the exhibition at Carriageworks – which features 18 contemporary artists from across the country – spilled out from the building and spoke to the site itself. That’s why, at the entrance to the exhibition space, there’s Sam Cranstoun’s ‘Utopia’ sculpture, inspired by Ken Done’s 1988 ‘Australia’ sculpture. As you venture inside, there are artworks that speak to popular culture, curious historical tales, and works that act as unlikely postcards from places and around the world. You can hop up on a platform in Nat Thomas’ ‘Postcards from the Edge’ and recreate a key scene from the Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine movie, and venture to the Arctic Circle in Mish Meijers and Tricky Walsh’s room-filling installation ‘The Crocker Land Expedition’, which imaginatively recreates a 1913 voyage in search of land that turned out to be a mirage. Tony Alber