Art, Wit, and Wonder: Sydney Contemporary 2025 Throws the Rulebook (and a Wink) Out the Window.

Forget your reverent gallery shuffle - Sydney Contemporary 2025 isn’t just rewriting the art fair playbook, it’s gleefully doodling all over it. With kinetic installations, buried performance artists, glow-up workshops for kids, and a sly jab at commercial sanctimony, this year’s fair is a heady blend of spectacle, smarts, and subversion. Call it the thinking person’s circus - with better lighting and a killer tote bag.

Take Lisa Reihana’s thousands of reflective discs cloaking the Carriageworks façade - it’s less “grand entrance” and more “divine shimmer portal.” Inside, Dr Christian Thompson AO vocalises the Bidjara language into the space, as though colonisation might finally meet its match in melody. Installation and Performance Contemporary, curated by José da Silva (UNSW Galleries), doesn’t just break the fourth wall - it asks it to kindly step aside and make room for nine genre-defiant works that throb, whisper, or just plant themselves (literally) in your path.

Kalisolaite 'Uhila spends hours neck-deep in dirt - part endurance piece, part metaphysical eye-roll at colonial land fetishism. Meanwhile, Jonny Niesche and Mark Pritchard’s low-frequency sound-sculptures promise to vibrate your chakras into a different timezone, while Zac Langdon-Pole’s haunting absence-sculptures ghost every white marble god in the canon. Forget frames - these works stretch into space, sensation, and sly provocation.

But let’s not pretend it’s all highbrow and no play. Gerwyn Davies’ meat-market-meets-textile-dreamscape is a delicious postmodern costume party with post-butchery realness. Glenn Barkley’s kids’ affirmation zone? Think Lisa Frank dropped acid at a community clay co-op. “There are no losers in contemporary art!” cries one sticker, and for once, the irony is lovingly sincere.

Even the Talks Program throws off its lanyard. “My Brat Summer” gathers curators who quote Marx and meme pages in equal measure, while “From the Love Seat” dishes the goss from art-world couples who cohabitate, collaborate, and sometimes just politely ignore each other in matching smocks. Less panel discussion, more podcast energy with the good mics on.

Inclusivity isn’t a theme - it’s the infrastructure. First-timers, emerging artists, and art-weary civilians are ushered in via “Ask Us Anything” booths and Mike Hewson’s GeoPets - buy-your-own-sculpture-by-weight in a mock Coles aisle setup. Aldi aesthetics meets art-world critique, and the checkout is conceptually heavy.

A debut sector, Photo Sydney, adds a crisp new lens to proceedings. Lisa Sorgini, George Byrne, wani toaishara, and Leila Jefferys flex photographic practices that range from dreamlike to disarmingly domestic. Meanwhile, booth highlights span Julia Ciccarone’s cinematic painting, Harriette Bryant’s quietly rebellious interiors, and the triumphant reappearance of Emily Kam Kngwarreye post-Tate at Justin Miller Art. If you missed her in London, you now have no excuse.

Internationally, it’s gloriously unruly. Mechanical carps from China? Check. Cyanotype-batik fusion from Indonesia? Absolutely. Pacific diaspora artists interrogating Google Maps’ colonial hangovers? Also yes. If anyone’s still trying to draw regional borders, good luck keeping your pencil steady.

What emerges is a show that’s cheeky without being shallow, profound without being preachy. Sydney Contemporary 2025 doesn’t flatten the art experience - it inflates it, bedazzles it, and invites you to lie on the floor under it, preferably in sticker-covered sunglasses. Whether you’re a collector, a cynic, a curious kid, or just here for the lolz and the lactose-free coffee, there’s space (and spectacle) for you.

This isn’t just a fair - it’s a fabulous, fractal cultural moment where the sacred meets the silly, and intellect gets a glitter bomb. Come for the discourse, stay for the dopamine hit. Art this good doesn’t whisper behind velvet ropes - it grabs your hand, spins you around, and insists you dance.

Tickets to Sydney Contemporary are available to purchase here.

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Words by AW.

Photos courtesy of Sydney Contemporary.