Concrete Playground

Friday, 7th August - 3AM
@ AGNSW

Biblical mythology, idyllic landscapes, wild animals, political caricatures, sensuality and hardcore pornography all come together in this collection of monochromatic lithography prints, derived predominantly from the AGNSW's collection.Linked by the medium of printmaking, as a whole what they show is the diversity of art and ideas in the Romantic age,...

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Friday, 31st July - Sunday, 30th August
@ Various cinemas

Spain is full of exquisite buildings and women, dramatic landscapes, and strange characters who give you obscure clues and instructions in matchboxes, right?Jim Jarmush's new film is an exploration of perception, memory, reality and consciousness which marks something of a departure from his earlier work. The film lacks the refined...

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Friday, 26th March - 9PM
@ Good God Small Club

Meet Smokey LaBeef and Exercise Mike, two dapper gentlemen who were drawn together by their ridiculous names and shared misfortune at having been born in the wrong decade.Rather that spend the rest of their lives pining away for those earlier days of neater heir styles and better dance moves, they...

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Sunday, 12th July - 3AM
@ Belvoir St Theatre

A coming-of-age story of three orphans and their lives over 18 years in one apartment, Alexei Arbuzov's The Promise has been rarely performed outside of Russia since it premiered in 1967. This new version by Nick Dear (based on Ariadne Nicolaeff's translation) is brought to life by 24-year-old director Simon...

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Friday, 31st July - 1PM
@ Belvoir St Theatre

This one man show might be about a bee sting, a childhood, a relationship with a woman - oh no, that's right, it's about nothing. But it does tell you that up front in the title, so you should be prepared for it.Not so much stream-of-consciousness as random puddles of...

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Sunday, 23rd August - 3AM
@ University of Sydney

Are your weekends behaving like those annoying soft toys in grabber machines? Like elusive soul-sucking hussies watching you with mocking eyes as you try to pick them up with your silly crane thing, before it's game over and you're empty handed? You rue all the lost pennies, hours and dignity,...

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Friday, 24th July - 5PM
@ Kaliman Gallery

Take a trip down memory lane with Richard and Stephanie nova Milne (aka Ms&Mr) and you find the lane soon becomes a labyrinth where parallel worlds collide, time is non-linear and anything is possible. Case in point: their new exhibition There There Anxious Future, where the past, the present and...

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Saturday, 4th April - 2PM
@ Campbelltown Arts Centre

We love larks after dark. We love Campbelltown Arts Centre. We love their ace program this year. We love the artists they are commissioning new work from. We love the Sizzler down the road. We even love the little drive down the M5. Our sincerest apologies, but there seems to...

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Friday, 21st August - 11AM
@ Chauvel Cinema

Semi-useful fact: 'babooshka'� is a widely but incorrectly used term for Russian Dolls. 'Babooshka' means 'grandma' in Russian and 'Kate Bush in a body suit' in English, and nothing else. The correct term for the hollow dolls of varying sizes that nest inside one another is 'matryoshka'.�Not unlike a matryoshka...

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Saturday, 29th August - 4AM
@ Serial Space

In celluloid we might have a chance to fight mortality and stay forever young, but who owns the images of ourselves on film and what happens when people start messing with them? Citing Laura Mulvey's essay Visual Narrative and The Pleasure Principle, the Paramount Pictures logo and independently run amusement...

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Friday, 4th September - 11AM
@ Firstdraft Gallery

Some say the reason Firstdraft is Sydney's oldest artist-run initiative, having survived 23 years in a town notorious for severely short-lived independent venues, is because of its rotating director program which means none of the administrators stay on for longer than two years, and energy is always fresh.We think it...

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Saturday, 8th August - 3AM
@ The White Rabbit

It is a testament to Chippendale's final stage of gentrification that the old working class suburb is not only home to several ARIs and commercial galleries, but now houses a big shiny contemporary art institute, The White Rabbit Collection.One of several new private foundations that are opening up across the...

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Friday, 4th September - Sunday, 18th October
@ Belvoir St Theatre

A good night at the theatre is like a night in the garden of Gethsemane: your ideologies are shaken up and you are forced to doubt your beliefs, but because of that you come away with a deeper understanding of things.A night with David Hare can have a similar effect....

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Friday, 28th August - 3AM
@ Breenspace Gallery

The second law of thermodynamics, entropy, states that all energy is eventually equalised. Molecules disintegrate as matter is neutralised; like ice cubes melting in a glass of water which in time will be room temperature. It sounds like a pretty self-evident law, but for centuries western culture has aspired to...

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Thursday, 10th September - 11AM
@ Firstdraft Gallery

With talk of building a utopia and working on the basis of 'doing everything', Bababa International cannot fairly be accused of lacking ambition. Thankfully, there seems to be an engine of thoughtful multi-tasking and active generosity behind the collective's drive. Ticked off from the 'everything'� list of things to do...

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Tuesday, 1st December - 6PM
@ Pigeonground

Hearing someone talk completely candidly without a speck of pretence is always treat, even more so if they are speaking about their life as pioneer of Aboriginal theatre, drug addict, cat burglar, regular jailbird, fine sartorialist, actor, musician and homosexual blackfella.Filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson followed Jack Charles with a camera through...

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Tuesday, 8th December - 10AM
@ Depot Gallery

Dance and photography often make for a troubled marriage: one lives for motion and temporality while the other is bent on freezing movement and time.In an attempt to reconcile the differences between the two, Hamish Ta-mé's new series of images of urban dancers captures simultaneous stillness and movement, fleetingness and...

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Friday, 18th December - Sunday, 7th February
@ Sydney Theatre Company

When Sydney Theatre Company released their 2009 program including an "untitled project" from Steven Soderbergh, there were some grumpy mummers from prospective subscribers who felt that being asked to sign up for a play nobody knew anything about was a bit rich, or, worse, that the company was over-investing in...

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Thursday, 7th January - Sunday, 14th February
@ Belvoir St Theatre

Part girl, part monster of the deep, Claudia O'Doherty is a three-dimensional being from Aquaplex, a futuristic underwater city that exploded. As the sole survivor, she has come to share her story with us by way of an informative presentation.Best known as one third of the Pig Island collective and...

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Thursday, 31st December - 8PM
@ Good God Small Club

Do you feed like an insatiable ogre off pride and praise, compliments and conquer, superiority and success? Of course you do. This December 31st, amongst the goodness, godliness and smallness of Good God Small Club's "bomb-proof bunker of yokel love", you can unleash your egotistic, egocentric and egomaniac selves to...

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Thursday, 14th January - 4PM
@ Secret Location

Arts Mobile Sydney is a free love-in at a secret location - kind of like that rave you went to in 1992 except this time you won't get stuck sharing lolly pops with the guy dressed as Sailor Moon who thinks he is Donald Trump hasn't slept for 11 days...

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Wednesday, 23rd December - Sunday, 31st January
@ Belvoir St Theatre

Adapted for the stage from the novel by Guus Kuijer, The Book of Everything takes place in Amsterdam in 1951 - with the trauma of WWII German occupation still clearly evident - and centres around the life of an open hearted 'little hero' Thomas Klopper. The 9-nearly-ten-year-old (played by 33-year-old...

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Friday, 8th January - Saturday, 20th February
@ Sydney Opera House

Beneath the thin veil of silliness in Voltaire’s Candide, little escaped his vicious attack: religion, art, politics, theologians, governments, armies and philosophers – especially Leibniz and his theories of the world's inherent order and goodness – were all shredded to pieces with writer's weapons of sharp wit, advanced insight and...

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Monday, 1st March - 6AM
@ Sydney Opera House

Spencer Tunick’s tableaux vivants are supposed to impress us with the raw beauty and power of the human form, but if you’re like me and find the naked adult body a bit ridiculous you might sooner respond to his work as an elaborate art of mass organisation and collaboration. Having...

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Thursday, 11th February - 8PM - Saturday, 13th February - 8PM
@ Good God Small Club

The last time I chatted to Darren Sylvester about his work, he said that the American sibling pop duo The Carpenters embodied the main sort of parable he aimed towards. Their obsessive ongoing refining and remastering of old songs to achieve the cleanest perfection possible, he said, was something he...

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Tuesday, 23rd February - Sunday, 7th March
@ Various venues in Erskineville

There’s a large amount of large stuff out there. Houses, shopping centres, cities, steaks, ocean liners, corporations, human bodies/egos … big just keeps getting bigger.Tiny Stadiums offers a retreat to the downsized. A (mostly) free live art festival centred around charming little Erskineville, the program offers baldness examinations, up-do consultations,...

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Monday, 22nd February - Thursday, 4th March
@ Japan Foundation Gallery

Beyond the clichés of cuteness and eccentricity, Japan is a country that has been through massive societal upheaval in the last four decades. It has seen the bubble economy and the effects of its dramatic burst, the rise of a hyper-consumerist culture, the information revolution, the exponential increase of population...

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Saturday, 13th February - Sunday, 2nd May
@ Art Gallery of New South Wales

Ukiyo — most often translated as ‘the floating world’ — refers to hedonistic Edo Japan, in particular the ‘pleasure quarters’ of Yoshiwara where brothels, chashitsu tea houses, sumo wrestling rings, geisha houses and kabuki theatres were frequented by the growing middle classes.Kitagawa Utamaro was a master ukiyo-e (woodblock prints,...

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Friday, 12th March - Saturday, 24th April
@ Wharf 1, Wharf Theatre

Theatres in Sydney over the last 12 months have been brimming with anti-epic domestic snapshots of fraught intimate relationships, and the latest from UK physical theatre company Frantic Assembly continues the trend.Todd and Kali are despicable human beings. They never leave each other’s side, love IKEA, brag about their beautifully...

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Thursday, 13th May - Sunday, 1st August
@ Artspace

When the Biennale of Sydney announced they would be transporting Tokyo’s SuperDeluxe to Artspace in Wooloomooloo, we weren’t sure exactly what they meant — but when we finally saw the program, we squealed like Japanese schoolgirls.There’s UJINO’s noise sculpture, Toydeath’s toy torture, the tangled sounds of Hair Stylistics and the...

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Thursday, 27th May - 6PM
@ CarriageWorks

We have friends with amusing names like Yellow Giant, Supernova, Brown Dwarf and Stella Black Hole. They problem is they don’t know we exist. So we must yell until they hear us. Six thousand fixed luminous points in the night sky are visible to the naked eye, but there are...

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Sunday, 13th June - Sunday, 25th July
@ Belvoir St Theatre

Certainly one of Shakespeare's strangest, this has been classified by scholars as a 'problem play'. The theatrical and moral challenges it poses are confronted head on in this highly charged production where nothing escapes scrutiny, not even us.

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Tuesday, 13th July - Saturday, 7th August
@ Old Fitzroy Theatre

Underneath the Old Fitzroy Hotel in Woolloomooloo for the next three weeks is the dark cavernous netherworld of nice sister Cat400 and mean sister Fluke, whose underground existence is turned upside down by a time travelling stranger dressed in white who has no memory but some sense. With the low-fi...

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Thursday, 19th August - Sunday, 21st November
@ Museum of Contemporary Art

Across the first two levels of the MCA things are being re-rendered, repositioned, re-presented and reduced. Banal snapshots from Flickr and Google Image are finely replicated in watercolour, a soccer ball finds itself made of polyurethane resin and automotive paint and elemental human emotions are turned into PowerPoint slides. Video didn't end up killing the radio star but it wasn't very nice to painting, which had terrible trouble being looked at let alone liked during the reign of new media. So it's nice to see included such out-of-vogue art forms as oil paint and watercolour, as well as a strong overall element of old school craftsmanship.

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Friday, 3rd September - Friday, 31st December
@ National Gallery Australia

A major new permanent Skyspace has just burst out of the earth at the National Gallery in Canberra. This exhibition invites visitors to sit in a sparse domed room that forms a stage for diurnal celestial cycles, where we look at projected light in and of itself, rather than at what it illuminates.

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