A painting of space

Welcome to the Power Institute. We are a Foundation based at the University of Sydney dedicated to understanding the visual world, through art and visual culture. We support research, publish texts, and organise events.

JW Power, [Untitled], c. 1938, oil on wood panel, 42.4 x 31.7 cm, JW Power Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum, PW1961.347.
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Queer Powerpoint ft. Jack Halberstam

An evening of corporate presentations and personal optimisation. But queer. And with Jack Halberstam.

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Perceiving Life beyond the Colonial Anthropocene

A reading and conversation at the AGNSW about non-extractive modes of being and seeing.

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Vale Lindsay Barrett

We mourn the passing of author and cultural historian Lindsay Barrett (1959-2023).

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Interview with Scholar in Residence Melody Rod-ari

Our 2023 Sydney Asian Art Series scholar Melody Rod-ari was recently interviewed on ABC's Art Show.

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All Fall Down: Post-Industrial Demolition Projects and the Aesthetic of Collapse

A lecture on the disorderly architecture of 1970s artist and activists in the United States.

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The Womanifesto Way: Sydney Gathers

A hybrid digital and in-person exhibition and publication project exploring the histories and collective ethos of Womanifesto, at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

Gerald McMaster stands facing the camera, wearing a white jacket.

Gerald McMaster: Scholar in Residence 2023

In 2023 and 2024, the University's Power Institute and the Discipline of Art History is hosting Gerald McMaster, an internationally renowned artist, curator and scholar of contemporary art, museology and Indigenous aesthetics from OACD University in Toronto.

Publishing

Visit our bookstore
Ends of Painting Cover

Ends of Painting: Art in the 1960s and 1970s
By: David Homewood and Paris Lettau

$40.00AUD
Contemporary art begins where painting ends, or so goes one of recent art history's most dominant narratives. This book is a post-mortem of the supposed death of painting in the period following World War II. In eleven essays by a global array of leading scholars, Ends of Painting offers a counter-history, showing how the practice and discourse of painting remained integral to art throughout the 1960s and 1970s.



Un Australian Art Cover

UnAustralian Art: Essays on Transnational Art History
By: Rex Butler & ADS Donaldson

$40.00AUD
UnAustralian Art: Ten Essays on Transnational Art History proposes a radical rethinking of Australian art. Rather than identifying a national sensibility, Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson demonstrate that Australian art and artists have always been engaged in struggles and creative exchanges with the rest of the world. Examining Australian art as much from the outside in as the inside out, Butler and Donaldson’s methods open Australian art history to an encyclopaedic multitude of hitherto excluded stories.