Free to the public, a widely-acclaimed installation by world-renowned street artist Rone, is now open. It’s part of The Outsiders Melbourne, a ground-breaking exhibition dedicated to showcasing amazing work by artists defying the art establishment.

Following his sold-out TIME exhibition at Flinders Street Station in 2022, the Melbourne-based street art sensation brings back one of the show’s most celebrated installations, The Workroom, to the heart of the street art capital.

A giant of the Australian street art movement, Rone is renowned for his evocative and immersive site-specific installations that breathe new life into forgotten spaces. He has exhibited widely in Australia and overseas, and his popular murals have transformed public spaces worldwide.

Italian sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino will present his first solo exhibition in Australia at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) from 7 June 2025–6 April 2026. From dripping metal to splintering wood, in the end, the beginning features a selection of kinetic sculptures that push matter to their edges, and premieres during Dark Mofo, as Tasmania’s midwinter solstice festival returns in full this year.

The exhibition’s title piece, in the end, the beginning, will see one of Mona’s subterranean galleries showered with molten steel. Heated to 1500°C, the liquid metal creates dramatic firelight sparks as it drips down from the ceiling. This work is a reimagining of the artist’s renowned installation Diplomazija astuta, originally created for the Malta Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Sassolino used the light of melted steel to evoke the chiaroscuro in Caravaggio’s 1608 altarpiece painting The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist.

Featuring a dazzling showcase of 100 elegant and avant-garde contemporary lights, furniture designed for neurodivergent audiences and leading designers and brands from across the country, Australia’s premier design festival Melbourne Design Week returns from 15 – 25 May 2025 offering a vital platform for creatives to showcase boundary-pushing work and test new ideas.

Over 11 days and 350+ events, exhibitions, talks, and installations, Melbourne Design Week will celebrate the depth and richness of design talent in the region from a new crop of emerging talent to the industry’s most well-respected and established professionals. Highlights include A New Normal an exhibition of designs to make Melbourne a self-sufficient city by 2030; a retrospective exhibition of lighting designer Volker Haug marking 20 years of designing and making in Australia; plus presentations by the country’s leading showrooms, studios and makers including Trent Jansen, Coco Flip, Jessie French, Fiona Lynch, Tait, Cult and more.

Bundanon has unveiled the first exhibition in its 2025 program, ‘Thinking together: Exchanges with the natural world’, which will present major commissions by contemporary artists Robert Andrew, Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan and Keg de Souza, presented alongside intricate paintings by the Martu communities of central Western Australia, and video works by Sorawit Songsataya and Tina Stefanou, from 1 March – 8 June 2025.

‘Thinking together: Exchanges with the natural world’ explores themes of reciprocity and collaboration between the human and non-human. Each work responds to notions of community, and considers the possibility that new knowledge can only be created through a process of thinking together, via communal making, cooperation between the species and embodying First Nations practices of knowledge sharing.

The first production in Bell Shakespeare’s 35th anniversary season in 2025 is a new contemporary staging of Henry 5, starring dynamic newcomer JK Kazzi in his highly anticipated mainstage theatre debut. Celebrated theatre maker and former Associate Artistic Director of Bell Shakespeare Marion Potts (Othello, Hamlet) returns to the company after 15 years to direct.

Potts lends a female perspective to this story centred on young men going to war, written by a male playwright and most often the domain of male directors. The play explores themes of masculine bravery and heroism, which Potts approaches with nuance, exposing the complexities of the characters and questioning the costs of war as Henry is hailed a warrior and a hero.