The best things to do in Sydney for free

Free outdoor movies return to Darling Quarter as the Night Owls Kids Film Festival sets up roost over 12 nights for its tenth year, from April 1-18.  Over three weeks from Thursday to Sunday there will be free features and short films, and live entertainment out on the green, with plenty of eateries close by for grabbing dinner. Attendees will enjoy evenings spent on socially-distanced picnic blankets as live music, short films and two movie screenings kick off from 5.45pm each night. The movies this year are not limited to kids' flicks, although parents can safely bring the little ones along to screenings including recent releases Peter Rabbit, The Addams Family (2019) and SCOOB!, plus enduring favourites like Despicable Me, Kung Fu Panda and RIO. Older viewers can show up to the 'After-Hours' screenings on Fridays and Saturdays from 8.30pm, including the recent rave adaption of Little Women, Ride Like A Girl, GO!, and In My Blood it Runs, a documentary from the perspective of a 10-year-old Aboriginal boy in Alice Springs. Each night kicks off with energetic entertainment curated by the much-loved Lah Lah, with acts including the Tip Toe Giants, Vegetable Plot, the Beanies and others. Peckish? You can pre-order snacks and meals for delivery right to your picnic rug from the precinct’s eateries using the Bopple app. Options include Braza Churrascaria, Vesta Italian, Umi Sushi, Nok Nok Thai Eating House and Taste Baguette and Grill. Gelatissimo or Guylian have the sweets to to

The Powerhouse Museum will mark Nowrouz – that's Persian New Year if you didn't know – on March 19 with a new exhibition, Iranzamin. It’s the museum’s first dedicated survey of their Persian arts and crafts collection, presenting more than 100 rarely seen gems. The show explores the rich social and cultural history of Persian society, known today as Iran, with a distinct focus on the Qajar era, spanning 1789-1925. The exhibition is divided into seven themes: Joy and Happiness, Purification and Cleansing, Spirituality and Devotion, Poetry and Calligraphy, Rituals and Performance, Patronage and Craftsmanship, and finally Nature and Design. Iranzamin encompasses everything from hand-woven carpets and rugs, to armour and weaponry, to beautiful blown glass pieces, ceramics, tiles and embroidery. Persia straddled two main trade routes in the Indian Ocean and the Silk Road, so many of its cultural traditions spread far and wide. Iranzamin also acknowledges the wide-reaching influence of this artistic diaspora, including the works of Australian painter and textile designer Florence Broadhurst. Curator Pedram Khosronejad says, “Persia has a long tradition of arts and crafts stretching back more than a millennium, but it was under the reign of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, King of Persia between 1848 and 1896, that Persian arts and crafts flourished. The Powerhouse’s Persian collection, mostly from the Qajar era, is unique, rich and diverse. The objects tell fascinating stories about Irania

When artist Daniel Jenatsch won the 2020 John Fries Award by the Copyright Agency last year, he would become the first winner of the coveted art award to wait until the following year to accept the award.  “I am really honoured to receive the John Fries award, I've been following the award for many years and each show has been so instructive in revealing where contemporary artistic and curatorial art's practice is at,” Jenatsch said in a statement. The annual $10,000 award showcases the most engaging and experimental works of emerging and early career visual artists across Australia and New Zealand. The current exhibition of finalists at UNSW Galleries in Paddington is the last piece in the award’s puzzle, with this being the eleventh and final year of this much-loved exhibition program. Seven finalists were selected from over 400 entries, with their works being created during the challenges of that certain global event that changed the world last year. Jenatsch’s winning work is the richly layered sound and animatronics installation The Close World 2021. Curator Miriam Kelly said that the judges found Jenatsch’s “conceptual and aesthetic approach well resolved and utterly compelling”.  She continued: “The work addresses complex contemporary interests in artificial intelligence and machine learning… With a sophisticated balance of high technology operations and low fidelity aesthetics, this installation elicits empathy from the audience, and in doing so offers a carefully nua

There are outstanding riches of colour on offer in the marvellous MCA outing for biennial contemporary art show The National. It’s a veritable cornucopia of creative excellence well worth whiling away a few hours in, especially as Sydney eases into the cooler months. Even when the work is black and white – like Caroline Rothwell’s mesmerically swirling digital animation ‘Carbon Emission 5, Constructivist Rococo’ – it is vibrantly so. APY Lands artist Betty Kuntiwa Pumani’s beautiful large-scale works on linen are a riot of reds and blues that thrum with desert life. Deborah Kelly’s dazzling video installation and accompanying portraits are whirlwind of human hybrid forms twirling for glory that will put you into a blissed-out trance. There’s a deep blue dingo stalking Pakistan-born, Sydney-based multi-disciplinary artist Mehwish Iqbal’s gorgeous tapestry work ‘Assemblage of the Fragmented Landscape’ and Maree Clarke’s stunning photography of topless men wearing traditional jewellery. Judith Wright’s stunning hanging portraits daubed on Japanese rice paper, and Lauren Berkowitz’ bright plastic pendants are also wow-making. Everywhere you look there’s something majestic, and nowhere more so than as you walk into the final works of the late First Nations artist Ms Wirrpanda, who was a respected leader of the Dhuḏi-Djapu clan of Dhuruputjpi until her untimely death just a few weeks before the opening of The National. The power of her work speaks for itself, and to share it amongs

From the moment you set foot in the Art Gallery of New South Wales outpost (AGNSW) of this year's spectacular Australian art biennial The National, your eye is immediately drawn down into the belly of this beast of a show, curated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art specialist Erin Vink and Asian art expert Matt Cox. Melbourne-based artists Wona Bee and Charlie Lawler draw you in with their haunting work ‘Regenerator’, a suspended row of seven charcoal circles that conjure up the ghostly trace of the bushfire season’s aftermath, but also hint at new life caught in endless circulation. This powerful piece hands over to Judy Watson’s sky-blue tapestries ‘clouds and undercurrents’ hanging over the escalators. A powerful way to reclaim the atrium’s open space, they create a beautiful focal point glimpsed from many spots below. Two astounding installations take up space in the very best way in the AGNSW exhibition. Justin Shoulder’s glorious inflatable installation ‘Aeon+: Titan Arum’ depicts a primordial soup-like scenario where inflatable creatures flail as if emerging from their mother’s womb, all bathed in fluctuating pink and purple hues. It’s mesmeric, and if you’re lucky enough, you’ll catch one of the fabulous LGBTQ+ artist’s live performances in the space. We also love Torres Strait Islander artist Alik Tipoti’s knowing wink works ‘Dhangal Madhubal’, depicting Southern Cross-adorned creatures, including a shark hanging from one gallery space ceiling. Also check o

Carriageworks has given over the vast hangar-like space of Bay 21 to contemporary art biennial show The National, as curated by Abigail Moncrieff. Don't miss Indigenous media group Karrabing Film Collective’s powerful 30-minute work ‘Day in the Life #1’. The group takes its name from the Emmi language word for “low tide turning” and their works interrogate inequality for First Nations’ peoples of the Northern Territory. A documentary-style work, it speaks up loud and proud. Elsewhere you can check out some really cool neon works by multi-disciplinary artist Darren Sylvester, including the funky ‘Psychic’s House’, and Brendan Van Hek’s ‘Portable Horizon (Aquamarine, midnight blue)’, which casts a vibrant glow over the space. A series of lightbox works by Alana Hunt also contribute to the glimmer as you walk through the cavernous space, filled with creativity. Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s trio of wire sculptures and smaller wall-hanging versions ‘Narrbong Galang’ are beautiful as you enter the main space, as are the bold red and yellow stripes of a giant graph-like creation by regular collaborators Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley. And don’t overlook Vernon Ah Kee, Dalisa Pigram and Marrugeku’s brilliant video installation ‘Guidirr Guidirr’ in Bay 19. A darkly comic laceration of racism in this country wrapped up in the astounding beauty of this continent, it’s one of the best films we’ve seen so far this year, and you’ll easily lose half an hour or more in its astounding gr

Step into a beautiful world of darkness and light that glows brighter than colour when UTS Gallery presents a gorgeous survey exhibition of the incredible photography of First Nations artist Hayley Millar Baker. Pulled together under the title There We Were All in One Place, it collects 35 works spanning five photographic series created between 2016 and 2019. Opening on April 13 and in place until June 4, the show explores Aboriginal experience and culture: a sense of place, family and identity. Millar Baker’s work is informed by her Gunditjmara and cross-cultural heritage, by a keen interest in historical archives, and also integrates photographs taken by her grandfather in celebration of inter-generational creativity. “Guided by a non-linear form of storytelling that sees past, present and future as an unbroken continuum, Millar Baker uses photography and storytelling to re-author history and assert the authority of memory and experience across generations,” says UTS Curator Stella Rosa McDonald. The exhibition is accompanied by a Learning Experience designed by curator and educator Emily McDaniel in consultation with Millar Baker. Aimed at tertiary students across disciplines but available to all visitors to the exhibition, the experience is designed to facilitate the development of personal connections to the work and encourages participants to reflect on their own personal experiences, memories and understandings. It will tour to Deakin University Art Gallery and Flinder

One of Australia’s most pioneering and prolific sculptors gets an overdue red carpet retrospective roll out at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion. Presented in partnership with Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern, the show spans the late, great sculptor's 50-year career, from early wood carvings right through to later space age kinetic wire works and major public commissions. “Margel Hinder was an agent for cultural change and part of the first generation of abstract artists in Australia,” AGNSW director Dr Michael Brand says. “This important retrospective reveals how vital Hinder was in the making of Sydney’s modernism and for asserting the place of sculpture within it.” Hinder was born in Brooklyn and studied in Buffalo, New York, and Boston, migrating to Australia in 1934 after marrying Australian artist Frank Hinder. It’s here where she truly made her mark. The show is co-curated by AGNSW senior curator of Australian art Denise Mimmocchi and Heide artistic director Lesley Harding, who says the exhibition represents a much-needed exploration of the breadth and depth of Hinder’s fascinating body of work. “Apart from her inclusion in a few surveys of local modernism, Hinder’s vanguard practice and its legacy have largely been overlooked since the 1980s. This exhibition presents her innovative and visually arresting sculpture to new generations and the wide audience it deserves.” Including maquettes (sculptural models or rough drafts), draw

Our relationship to what we buy and how we see ourselves is explored in a cool new exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Marian Tubbs. She loves to build speculative feminist worlds, drawing from a rich and varied canvas. As an author and an academic who lectures in Photomedia at the National Art School, Tubbs works across painting, installation, video and the internet realms. Diving deep into big ideas, she marries high and low culture in an ongoing exploration of our shifting relationship to the digital image. Which is pretty spot on when it comes to addressing our smartphone and social media obsessions. Her latest exhibition, A complicated good time, shows at Station gallery in Potts Point as part of Art Month. It opens March 20 and runs through to April 17. We love the lush, collage-style worlds she builds, creating a dialogue about our notions of worth and value, of voyeurism and consumption. Tubbs questions the way we consume images, and how that influences the way we live. If you want to hear more, you can join Tubbs on opening morning, March 20, at 10.30am for the launch of her latest book, We need privacy guys here too. She’ll discuss her practice and her latest work with contributing writers Hamish Sawyer, Holly Childs and Dr Nancy Lee. There's nothing complicated about our love for her work. Love art that makes you think? Also check out The National.

The Hurstville Museum and Gallery pops this summer with the arrival on tour of the 2019 Stencil Art Prize finalists. Exhibiting from February 6 though to May 2, the show features the edgy, eye-catching and politically charged works created by 55 creatives from across the globe. There’s a mind-bending array of technique on display too, from photo-realist stencils built painstakingly, layer upon layer, to intricate hand-cut works crafted on delicate paper. Australian artists from the 2019 run share the space with works from fellow creative souls from as far afield as Scotland, South Korea and the States, as well as spots closer to home, including Indonesia and New Zealand. The largest stencil event in the world began back in 2009 with a small grant from Marrickville Council of $500 and has grown to be a truly global event with a hefty $10,000 prize pot attached. So head along to Hurstville and take a squiz at some of the the whiziest works in stencil art while they're in town.  Love this? Also check out our guide to the best street art in Sydney.