Visiting Carriageworks where a number of World Pride performances and exhibitions are being held. I am not going to provide closeups as some of the objects are very sexually explicit.

Marri Madung Butbut (Many Brave Hearts): First Nations Gathering Space

Marri Madung Butbut (pronounced: Mah-ree Mah-dung, Bootboot) is the largest Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander & global First Nation LGBTQIA+SB program to take place in Australia. It’s a party, an artwork, and a gift – First Nation queer artists sharing their artistry and voices for the world to hear.

Located on Gadigal land, the renowned multi-arts organisation Carriageworks will come alive with six days of global First Nations creativity.

From free exhibits, to theatre, dining and drag, Marri Madung Butbut: the First Nations Gathering Space will be the place where everyone is welcome to experience the rainbow heart of the oldest surviving culture on the planet. This is Marri Madung Butbut – Many Brave Hearts.

Amsterdam Rainbow Dress

The monumental Amsterdam Rainbow Dress artwork (click here to learn more) has made its first visit to Australia to shine a light on the human rights issues affecting the global LGBTQIA+ community, ahead of the Sydney WorldPride Human Rights Conference in March 2023.

Created in the Netherlands by Mattijs van Bergen, Arnout van Krimpen, Jochem Kaan and Oeri van Woezik, the dress is made from the national flags of the 71 countries where it is still illegal to be LGBTQI+ on penalty of imprisonment, torture or death. The list of countries is as compiled by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA World).

The dress’s arrival in Sydney comes as the harbour city prepares to welcome 1,500 community leaders, activists, politicians and human rights experts from across the globe to the International Conference Centre, Sydney (ICC) for the Sydney WorldPride Human Rights Conference. Taking place from 1 to 3 March 2023, it will tackle the key human rights issues facing LGBTQIA+ communities around the world, and is the largest event of its kind ever to be held in the region.

Paul Yore: Word Made Flesh

Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH is a major new immersive installation by one of Australia’s most provocative multidisciplinary artists.

Paul Yore’s work engages with the histories of religious art and ritual, queer identity, pop-culture and neo-liberal capitalism, recasting a vast array of found images, materials and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux and sculptural assemblages which celebrate hybrid and fluid identities, unstable and contradictory meanings, and the glowing horizon of queer worldmaking.

WORD MADE FLESH is a new architecturally-scaled installation, anarchically composed of improvised makeshift structures, mixed media sculpture and found objects, collage and assemblage, painting, video, and pulsating sound and light. Conceived as a cacophonous, kaleidoscopic ‘gesamtkunstwerk’, WORD MADE FLESH imagines a queer alternative reality, erected from the wasteland of the Anthropocene, performatively implicating itself into the debased spectacle of hyper-capitalist society.  Curated by Max Delany, in collaboration with Paul Yore and Devon Ackerman.