PICA’s 2026 artistic program promises to deliver a powerful mix of visual arts, contemporary performance, film screenings, open studio and creative development showings, across four seasons, each with a defining framework of shared ideas.
Each season will be presented across 8-10 weeks and accompanied by a supporting program of events, ranging from artist-designed learning activities in our PICA Hub to panels, tours and workshops.
In 2026 PICA will continue its work with local, Australian and international artists across all art forms, using an approach which they say deepens the institutions commitment to highlighting and connecting local stories within global conversations.
courtesy of Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Gadigal/Sydney. Photo: David Suyasa
Each season in the program is named after one or more of the Noongar seasons. The year will begin with Bunuru, with the exhibitions running from 6th February until 29th March.
Awakening Histories will form part of the Perth Festival program and explore the deep connection between the First Nations people of Northern Australia and the Makassan seafarers of South Sulawesi in Indonesia.
Developed by a curatorium of researchers and curators based in Australia and Indonesia, it brings together new artists’ commissions and key works from major collections, foregrounding the storytelling of art and artists and following trade routes and cultural exchange to recast history.
Concurrently visitors will also be able to see Painting Itself / 绘画本身. An exhibition of five painters from Hong Kong, Kuantan, London, Shanghai and Singapore.
The exhibition explores a new horizontal culture in painting, where fundamental ideas about its history and vitality—long the influence of European and American values—are being reshaped in East and Southeast Asia.
A new site specific work will also be offer through out the year. Established in 2022, the Judy Wheeler Commission is a ten-year program made possible through a philanthropic gift to PICA by the Simpson Family. It funds an annual site-specific work by an Australian visual artist that responds physically or conceptually to the architecture and history of the PICA building.
Jen Berean and James Carey’s Soft Grates is the fourth in the Judy Wheeler Commission series and invites visitors to contemplate how institutions mark time and hold memory through the presence of water. Their three-part installation includes a sculptural intervention which sees water slowly drip into vessels over the duration of the year.
Contemporary Arts ( PICA). Image courtesy of the artist.
Wiradjuri–Scottish artist April Phillips creates deeply sensory, immersive installations that merge First Nations knowledge, science and poetic computation.
Her newly-commissioned work, Under Waters, carries audiences into a speculative past, billions of years before our own, when saltwater stretched across most of the Earth’s surface. The installation celebrates water as a key element of life, opening a portal into deep time where oceanic and celestial realms entwine.
From 19th February through to 29th March visitors are invited to drop into Studio 2 and slow down and dwell within a living, generative environment that reshapes itself in response to their presence.
Through real-time body tracking, each person’s silhouette dissolves and reforms as Xenophora-like forms echoing marine molluscs that adorn their shells with gathered fragments. As audiences linger, their digital bodies accrete layers of coral, sand, rock and stellar matter, becoming part of an abundant natural world.
Check out everything happening at PICA via their website.
