Time Out Sydney Arts & Culture Awards 2024: Best Art Exhibition Nominees

Even if you didn't go inside the Art Gallery of NSW to see this monumental Louise Bourgeois retrospective, you've surely seen the huge metallic spider sculpture that took up residence out the front of the Gallery for almost six months. Paying tribute to the late French-American artist and her work's enduring charge of intimacy and urgency, this exhibition spun tangled webs around the minds of everyone who encountered it. The standout of the 2023 Sydney International Art Series, this was also the first solo artist exhibition in Naala Badu (the Gallery's new, modern North Building). Divided into two sections, visitors moved through 'Day' before heading underground to discover 'Night' in the darkness of The Tank. The inventive curatorial choices made this a profoundly moving experience.

A state-of-the-art temple to contemporary Chinese art hidden on a Chippendale backstreet, White Rabbit Gallery is the passion project of billionaire philanthropist Judith Neilson, and we always look forward to what's in store here. Taking over all four gallery floors for the first half of 2024, A Blueprint for Ruins is a peak example of what White Rabbit does best: a beautiful and multifaceted art show that will stun you with beauty and scale, and then challenge you with provocative questions and social conumdrums. 

The Biennale of Sydney pulled out all the stops for its 50th anniversary edition in 2024. It took over six different locations around the city with stunning and provocative art by artists from all over the world, and while we wouldn't want to play favourites, the stand-out venue was absolutely White Bay Power Station. After being closed to the public for more than 100 years, the heritage-listed industrial site in Rozelle was relaunched as a hub for arts, culture and community with the Biennale. Exploring the space itself is just as exciting as the art – but the curators didn't hold back either.

A huge painting by artist Dylan Mooney overlooked the scene. With a high-impact art style awash in saturated colours, Mooney has drawn on his experiences as a Queer Indigenous man to pay tribute to Aboriginal dancer and activist Malcolm Cole in the iconic Captain Cook drag costume he wore in the 1988 Sydney Mardi Gras Parade, the year of Australia’s Bicentenary (look out for more references to this cultural moment throughout the Biennale – including in images from the legendary photographer William Yang). Other highlights include the head of a giant blue deity, people dressed as human-sized foxes making mischief in domestic debris, and many more weird and wonderful sights. 

An interdisciplinary artist of Japanese and Sāmoan descent, Yuki Kihara made waves at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, where she was the first Fa’afafine (Sāmoa’s ‘third gender’) artist to represent Aotearoa New Zealand. Lucky for us, the Powerhouse (Ultimo) brought an expanded presentation of her body of work, Paradise Camp, to Sydney audiences to view for free. A meshing of visual art, research and historical documentation featuring 12 vividly colourful photographic tableaus – Kihara's work employs humour and queer sensibilities to skewer prevalent forms of ignorance, from colonial conceptions to climate change denial. Paradise Camp boldly deconstructs the work of famous French Post Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin (spoiler: he probably never even went to Tahiti) by recreating his paintings with her queer Pasifika community. She even donned prosthetics to film a drag king impression of the deceased European art hero. Fierce. 

You know what Sydney’s gallery scene hasn't had near enough of? Weird non-stop performance art installations. Thank goodness, the MCA came through for us. Pushing the limits of "art exhibition", Australian-born Berlin-based choreographer Adam Linder used choreography as curation. A rotating cast of dancers performed all day, every day while the exhibition was open; alongside contributions from the MCA's archive and recreations of the gallery's architecture (including those iconic fluoro orange and pink toilet stalls). Incorporating commentary on the "virtuosic angling" of selfie culture, this peculiar encounter won't soon be forgotten by anyone who experienced it.

A special addition to the nominees for Best Art Exhibition from a NSW regional gallery, this multi-faceted showing from Newell Harry at MAMA (Murray Art Museum Albury) deserves some recognition. Curated by Michael Moran, Esperanto takes its name from an artificial language devised in 1887 by a Polish eye doctor, which was a utopian, Eurocentric attempt to establish universal second language. An Australian-born artist of South African and Mauritian descent, Harry's multidiscinplinary practice combines original pieces with found objects and meticulous museum-style curation to tell stories both big and small.