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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
