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MCA Australia announces artist line-up for its major summer exhibition Data Dreams: Art and AI, part of the Sydney International Art Series 2025–26

5 November 2025
by Media Release
Written by Media Release

MCA Australia announces artist line-up for its major summer exhibitionData Dreams: Art and AI, part of the Sydney International Art Series 2025–26

Media Release Posted 05 November,2025

 

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) will premiere a landmark assembly of global art innovators for its major summer exhibition for the 2025–26 Sydney International Art Series, Data Dreams: Art and AI. Opening on 21 November 2025, this groundbreaking exhibition is the first of its kind to be staged by an Australian institution, bringing together ten visionary artists from around the world to explore the profound impact of artificial intelligence on contemporary life and creative practice.Through immersive installations, AI-generated films, hallucinatory images and mind-expanding sculptures, Data Dreams invites audiences to experience the possible futures in art and reflect on the evolving relationship between human and machine intelligence.

Artworks in the exhibition highlight AI’s role as an artistic collaborator, its impact on reality and perception, its role in shaping human relationships, and its potential to redefine our understanding of intelligence and perhaps even life itself.

Data Dreams presents projects by contemporary artists working at the forefront of art and AI including:

Angie Abdilla (palawa, lutruwita/Tasmania, Australia): Indigenous knowledge systems are brought into dialogue with Western astrophysics in Abdilla’s Meditation on Country (2024), combining scientific and cultural datasets.
Fabien Giraud (France): MCA Australia presents the world premiere of The Feral – Epoch 1 (2025), a thousand-year-long film fully shot and edited by an artificial intelligence, involving 32 generations of humans in a dramatic landscape in central France.
Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler (Australia/Serbia): Anatomy of an AI System (2018) is a visual investigation into the real-world infrastructure and raw materials required to fabricate, power and dispose of ‘smart’ AI devices, mapping the profound implications of these new technologies for humanity and the planet.
Lynn Hershman Leeson (USA): Logic Paralyzes the Heart (2021) and Cyborgian Rhapsody: Immortality (2023) from Leeson’s acclaimed Cyborg film series (1994–2023) trace the radical ways that AI and other technologies are reshaping our lives, societies and the environment. As a foundational innovator in the field, Leeson has been exploring the relationship between technology and humanity since the 1960s.
Agnieszka Kurant (Poland): In Kurant’s sculptural work Chemical Garden (2021/2025), plant-like crystals grow in an aquarium from the same metal salts found in computers and deep-sea vents. In Conversions (2019 –ongoing) a liquid crystal painting morphs in response to emotional data collected from millions of social media accounts using a custom AI system.
Trevor Paglen (USA): In Paglen’s photographic series Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (2017– ongoing), uncanny AI-powered images invite us to look inside the strange world of datasets and neural networks, probing the limits of machine perception.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas (UK): The Finesse (2022) is a monumental video installation which transports audiences into a simulated forest melding pop culture and political science. Combining archival footage with AI-generated avatars –  it questions the role AI technologies play in a world where real and fake messages are indistinguishable. Kulendran Thomas invites us to discern the truth for ourselves.
Hito Steyerl (Germany): An expansive new installation blending documentary footage, AI-generated imagery, and sculptures of digital forms by acclaimed artist Hito Steyerl, Mechanical Kurds (2025) examines the sinister worlds of AI-led warfare and surveillance, and the hidden human labour behind these powerful systems.
Anicka Yi (South Korea): Anicka Yi looks to possibilities for intelligence and collaboration beyond human and organic life in Radiolaria (2023–25), a series of luminous suspended sculptures that undulate like deep-sea creatures. Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up The Light of The Moon (2024) is a 3D animation generated using custom AI software designed to carry on her art practice after her death.
Curated by MCA Australia’s Jane Devery (Senior Curator, Exhibitions), Anna Davis (Curator), and Tim Riley Walsh (Assistant Curator), Data Dreams transforms the MCA’s galleries into a series of experiential spaces that invite visitors to engage with the possibilities and provocations at the intersection of art and AI.

Suzanne Cotter, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia said:
‘Data Dreams: Art and AI is a landmark exhibition that reflects the Museum’s commitment to presenting bold, forward-thinking contemporary art. It offers everyone who visits the exhibition a unique opportunity to consider how artists are responding to one of the most transformative technologies of our time.’

The exhibition will be accompanied by a dynamic public program including talks, workshops, and performances, to be announced closer to the opening.

MCA Australia thanks Strategic Sponsor Destination NSW for its support. The Sydney International Art Series, established in 2010, brings the world’s most outstanding exhibitions exclusively to Sydney through a partnership between Destination NSW, MCA Australia, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

MCA Australia would like to acknowledge Kevin O’Brien and Kate Campbell from BVN for the exhibition design of Data Dreams.

Tickets to the exhibition are available to purchase from mca.com.au. The exhibition is free for MCA members and people aged 18 and under.

Data Dreams: Art and AI opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia on 21 November 2025 and is on until 26 April 2026.
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