The Best Free Events to Catch During Sydney Festival 2025

This contemporary art exhibition explores water as both life-sustaining and as a metaphor for the human experience. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Water, the exhibition reflects water’s emotional and intellectual depths — its ability to summon empathy, heartbreak, pleasure and destruction.

Image: Tamara Dean, Turbulance

The Sydney Trapeze School is bringing its high-flying aerial show to Darling Harbour with two free daily performances of death-defying, acrobatic thrills.  With students aged 14 years and over, the school has been training its aspiring circus artists all year so that its top aerialists can showcase jaw-dropping tricks, splits and catches.

Enjoy an enchanting summer evening with some of Australia’s most talented musicians, including Egyptian-Australian composer and oud virtuoso Joseph Tawadros AM performing some of his most striking works. This free performance by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra culminates in a spectacular fireworks finale, so bring your loved ones and elevate your picnic experience at this all-ages concert in the Greater Sydney Parklands.

Throughout January 2025, summer evenings will come alive at Manly’s waterfront gallery. Art, music and ideas collide in a vibrant celebration over three programs every Thursday, January 9—23. The Manly Art Gallery and Museum invites you to explore The Water Understands exhibition, offering fresh perspectives on the curator’s process. Visitors will also enjoy live music, art-making activities and thought-provoking talks while sipping on a glass of wine from Little Ripples.

Discover a dazzling rotating showcase of works from Australia’s top video and sound artists at this free exhibition by Enigma in its immersive black box space on The Thirsty Mile — Sydney Festival’s pop-up precinct. Expect an unforgettable melding of music, noise, colour and creativity via installations conceived by John Gillies, Philip Samartzis, Martin Walch, Sean Williams, and Max Lyandvert.

Telly Tuita, Sydney Festival’s Visual Artist in Residence at The Thirsty Mile, is bringing his vibrant “Tongpop” aesthetic to this year’s Festival precinct, celebrating his Pacific heritage and the energy of Sydney. Drawing on his Tongan roots and maritime history, Tuita’s work features extravagant totems, dancing divas and immersive spaces transformed into trippy dreamscapes.

Images: Neil Bennett

This dynamic, interactive artwork invites Sydneysiders to share their hopes for a sustainable future via messages written to our lands and waterways. Throughout the festival, these written wishes will be inscribed on bamboo stalks, which are then woven into a unique installation on Tallawoladah Lawn, in front of the MCA and overlooking Circular Quay. Created by artist collective Cave Urban, this new and evolving work poses the question: what do we want to leave behind? It also invites personal reflections, asking the viewer if they will be proud or ashamed of what they will eventually leave behind.

This pioneering Pacific Islander-led exhibition features site-specific works by artists Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta, curated by Bougainville-born artist Taloi Havini. Through story, song, movement and activism, this compelling and thought-provoking happening invites the audience to connect with southern hemisphere communities and hear their calls for climate justice. The exhibition also includes conversations, other performances and opportunities for audiences to connect with Pacific communities, placing shared experiences and collective action around climate justice at the heart of this artistic event.