At first glance, Eora/Sydney’s art scene appears more robust than ever. Over the summer, the city hosted three blockbuster exhibitions—for Vasily Kandinsky, Louise Bourgeois, and Tacita Dean—as part of the Sydney International Art Series held across the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Snapshots of Bourgeois’s monumental spider sculpture Maman (1999) soaked in the subtropical rain circulated social media alongside images of the newly unveiled Sydney Modern complex. The celebratory Sydney Festival 2024, which, while acknowledging the sense of “distress . . . due to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas,” kicked off the new year by activating arts, music, and performance venues across the city.

Adding to the list of Eora/Sydney’s infrastructural developments is the refurbished Artspace. Coinciding with its 40th anniversary in December, Artspace’s reopening in Woolloomooloo’s Gunnery presented Jonathan Jones’s collaborative project untitled (transcriptions of country) (2021), which traced the lives of Aboriginal cultural objects and native flora and fauna expropriated by the French in the 19th century. Upstairs boasts ten renovated studios offered for annual residencies—a lifeline for artists in a city with skyrocketing rental prices.