Concrete Playground

film Chauvel Cinematheque

Monday, 2nd November - Monday, 28th December
@ Chauvel Cinema

The Chauvel’s Cinematheque may be the closest thing we’ll ever come to an ideal world. Germany and France border the USA harmoniously. Black, white and colour receive equal treatment. Comedy follows horror; romance follows tragedy. November starts off with seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead (Nov 2), followed by a bit...

film Coco Avant Chanel

Friday, 31st July - Sunday, 16th August
@ Various cinemas

Coco Avant Chanel is not a film about fashion. Instead, Anne Fontaine’s film seeks to gain traction in a time where the legend of Coco has been overshadowed by her famous initials, eschewing a sartorial focus in order to reveal the character underneath. The making of the womenswear icon unfolds...

art free Spooky Action at a Distance

Friday, 4th December - 11AM
@ Black & Blue Gallery

The distance between Spooky Action and you is about to get a little smaller. Concrete Playground’s editor Amelia Groom has curated an exhibition of video works from Japanese artists to coincide with the first event for the Ksubi/Kirin Big in Japan initiative.Artists include Daito Manabe, who seems to be inching...

art free music Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music

Thursday, 6th August - 5PM
@ Blender Gallery

Joni Mitchell best summed up Woodstock in her 1970 song of the same name:“We are stardust/We are golden/And we’ve got to get ourselves/Back to the garden”.Funny thing is, Joni didn’t even make it to the festival; she wrote the song on the strength of what she’d heard from Graham Nash....

free play Deus Bicycle Swap Meet #4

Saturday, 16th January - 12PM
@ Deus Ex Machina Carpark

If someone's trying to tell me to get a move on and they say "on your bike", I feel like popping them one to the jaw. However, if the bike on offer were an Original DM4 from Deus Ex Machina, I'd probably thank them kindly and be on my way....

art free Del Kathryn Barton: 'the stars eat your body'

Friday, 27th November - 11AM
@ Kaliman Gallery

The names of Del Kathryn Barton’s solo shows make her sound like some sort of Australian Miranda July. You could say “an artistic Miranda July,” but Miranda July makes art now – so anyone can be an artist, but not everyone can be a Del Kathryn Barton. The Sydney-based painter...

art free Three Of A Perfect Pair

Friday, 14th August - 6AM
@ MOP Gallery

Siblings Dan and Dom Angeloro spend their days laughing behind pop culture’s back in their writing, video art, installations, photo-collages and occasional curatorial gig. They currently have a new work featured in Three of a Perfect Pair, an exhibition at MOP Gallery which brings together some of the very best...

art free Contemporary Art + Philanthropy

Friday, 21st August - 3AM
@ Sherman Galleries

Art is difficult to talk about and even more difficult to unconditionally support – but not so for Gene and Brian Sherman. Gene, the former director of Sherman Galleries, and husband Brian are synonymous with cultural patronage, and Words, Etc. at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is simply the next link in...

art free Emily Floyd

Friday, 14th August - 5PM
@ Anna Schwartz Gallery

Emily Floyd prefers to keep things real. In fact, inauthentic gestures are so bothersome to her that she’s created three installations, entitled Garden, Our Community Garden, Alternative School and Farmers Market, to represent genuine solutions to the realistic possibilities of food shortage, catastrophic climate change and political despotism. Collectively,...

film Mu Meson Archives

Friday, 2nd January - Thursday, 31st December
@ Mu Meson Archives

In particle physics, mu meson is the former name for muon, an elementary particle, hypothesized to be the force that binds protons and neutrons together. After it exhibited only a weak attraction to nuclear matter, mu meson was cast out from the meson family and renamed. As a ridiculously overextended...

art play Even Books #10: Mountain Dream Tarot & Jean Debuffet

Sunday, 30th August - 12PM
@ Fraser Studios

So someone’s trying to tell you that you don’t know the meaning of art. Don’t get mad, get Even Books! The debaucherous book club parties started as a “real-world offshoot of an online magazine,” according to co-founder Angela, “but Even Books grew little baby legs of its own and took...

film Paper Heart

Friday, 25th September - Thursday, 15th October
@ Various cinemas

Let’s take a minute to talk about love. As one of the most powerful yet overused four-letter words in the English language, next to “fuck” and “cake”, love at times feels dangerously close to overexposure.Like many before her, Charlyne Yi wanted to uncover the truth behind the word. In Paper Heart,...

film Moon

Friday, 9th October - Friday, 27th November
@ Various Cincmas

Arduous employment, paranoia and fear of isolation are universal human experiences. In the grand tradition of social anxiety-steeped science fiction, Moon explores these experiences on a magnified scale: what if your job required you to oversee the mining of space minerals? What if you were completely alone on a space station...

film An Education

Friday, 23rd October - Wednesday, 2nd December
@ Various cinemas

Every once in a while a film comes along that makes us wish to be a school girl in 1960s London being romanced by a much-older man who, although guided by a skewed moral compass, is the perfect person with which to explore the best and worst of what adulthood...

art free Araby Steen - New Work

Saturday, 26th September - 11AM
@ The Trophy Room Gallery

Araby Steen is the first to admit that her work is a little difficult to describe.In her first show since finishing at the National Art School – who failed to give her a certificate of graduation, although they did remember to award her a prize – Steen will exhibit fifteen...

music Rowland S. Howard

Friday, 23rd October - 2PM
@ Oxford Art Factory

It’s a sad fact of life that we can’t all be Australian National Treasures like Rowland S. Howard. Sure, you can start a band – but it won’t be The Birthday Party. Of course, you can write some songs – but they won’t sound like Come Fall. And by all means,...

film Departures

Friday, 16th October - Sunday, 15th November
@ Various cinemas

Death and taxes are two certainties in life. Good cinema, unfortunately, is not — but leave it to the Japanese to make a film about death and everyday tragedies that will make you laugh until you cry, or cry until you laugh, or both in no particular order.Departures follows Daigo...

film play Sydney Bicycle Film Festival

Wednesday, 11th November - Sunday, 15th November
@ Chauvel Cinema

I don’t want to start with a lame joke about how this film festival will be wheely good. Nor do I want to talk about how there are so many good films to choose from that you might find yourself in a fixie. I guess it’s just that, with so...

film Genova

Thursday, 5th November - Saturday, 5th December
@ Various cinemas

From the outset, Genova makes no apologies for being difficult. The film opens with the death of Barbara (Catherine Keener), wife of Joe (Colin Firth) and mother of 16 year-old Kelly (Willa Holland) and young Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) in a horrific car accident. Unable to face the idea of simply...

film Battles Without Honour and Humanity

Saturday, 7th November - Saturday, 14th November
@ Chauvel Cinema

Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity (1973) harks back to a time when directors of mob films didn’t care about “slick,” they just focused on “violent”. The film follows Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara), living the thug life on the mean streets of Hiroshima in 1945. In its post-war state,...

film Speakeasy Cinema

Saturday, 21st November - Sunday, 22nd November
@ Paddington Town Hall

Who says you can make a film festival out of just three films? But, on the other hand, who says you can’t? Presented as part of the Anode independent arts festival, Speakeasy Cinema celebrates the influence of the contrary and controversial on all forms of culture through a series of...

music Jazz in the Garden

Sunday, 22nd November - 6PM
@ Vaucluse House

Jazz. What does it even mean? Some theories say the word was derived from “jass”, which meant “with vigour”, a popular term in early 20th century America. It’s certainly come a long way, because now you’re just as likely to hear jazz in Storyville, New Orleans as you are in...

film 13th Japanese Film Festival

Tuesday, 24th November - Tuesday, 1st December
@ Event Cinemas

Is there anything Japan doesn't have? Department stores full of plastic food models and animal hats, the world’s biggest pedestrian crossing, brothels shaped like train carriages… and a whole lot of great films! The 13th Japanese Film Festival jumps from bittersweet comedies to interpersonal dramas to dystopic action films, with...

music Massive Attack

Monday, 15th March - 7PM - Tuesday, 16th March - 7PM
@ Sydney Opera House

Incongruous fact: Massive Attack were once heavily supported by Neneh Cherry. But that Robert Del Naja and Andrew Vowles returned the favour and worked on Raw Like Sushi is not too surprising. After all, the Bristol-based pair started out as producers and went on to influence artists from Mos Def...

art free Phil James and Shunga Woodcuts

Sunday, 31st January - Monday, 22nd February
@ Ray Hughes Gallery

There is something uneasy about the union of modern porn and traditional Japanese art. This irksome feeling is an entry point into Phil James’s work. In this exhibition, James displays his pop-culturally smarmy, hentai-inspired illustrations alongside erotic 19th century Japanese woodcarvings. The works are disparate but have a few things...

film Somewhere Near Tapachula World Premiere

Thursday, 25th February - 6PM - Wednesday, 3rd March - 4PM
@ Dendy Opera Quays

Something big went down not long ago, somewhere near Tapachula. A group of 50 Mexican kids, raised in impoverished conditions and commonly abused, learned to surf. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that, “in the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows”, and this...

music Raekwon

Friday, 12th March - 8PM
@ The Metro

There are fans, and then there are Wu Tang Clan fans. They stand alone in their willingness to tattoo the Wu 'W' onto their skin, memorise every lyric and follow all nine members’ solo careers. Well, it’s eight members if you discount ODB and ten if you include Cappadonna, but...

music Dr. John & the Lower 911

Saturday, 27th March - 9PM
@ The Basement

In an awfully racist book called Voodoo in New Orleans, 1940s writer Robert Tallant describes a voodoo priest — a freed slave who claimed to be a Senegalese prince. According to the book, the priest claimed to have 15 wives and 50 children, and wore a frilly white shirt. He...

art The Shilo Project

Monday, 5th July - Sunday, 1st August
@ S.H. Ervin Gallery

One hundred artists have connected the dots of Neil Diamond's [i]Shilo[/i] record sleeve, but some of the greatest works are op-shop discards that the previous owners have taken to with pencil or blue biro.

film The Killer Inside Me

Thursday, 26th August - Sunday, 26th September
@ Various cinemas

If we are to believe cinema, murder is a game of cat and mouse - this film has a cat and certainly a lot of female mice. It is a bleak story told uncomfortably well, staying true to its origins as a Pulp Fiction-style story, and holding you through every kick and punch until it finishes on its own terms.