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Lighting of the Sails: Kiss of Light by David McDiarmid

23 May – 14 June 2025

Pulsing with energy, and the spirit of the underground, Kiss of Light celebrates David McDiarmid’s specific alchemy of lust, rage and hope.

Defying classification, McDiarmid’s work encompasses the complex and interconnected histories of art, craft, fashion, music, sex, gay liberation and identity politics.

Australian Arts Review

Useful information:

To resist, to hope, to dream

A defining voice of late 20th century radical counterculture, David McDiarmid fused art, fashion, nightlife with bold activism and unapologetic self-expression. 

On the 30th anniversary of the artist’s death, Lighting of the Sails: Kiss of Light transforms his life’s work, rooted in activism and provocation, into a new animation projected onto the Sydney Opera House for Vivid Sydney. 

Organised by mood and feeling, Kiss of Light is a slow dance of texture, colour, feeling and ideas, tracing the artist’s punk, queer sensibility. Featuring four key bodies of work —the Bedsheet Paintings, Disco Kwilts, Kiss of Light and Rainbow Aphorisms — the animation draws forward McDiarmid’s practice to the present day, broadcasting the experiences of a repressed minority while embodying complex truths, absorbing fear and preserving memory. 

Across seven minutes, Kiss of Light reveals how McDiarmid used irony, humour and fierce intimacy to celebrate diverse gender and sexual identities. By honouring the utopian underpinnings of his work, Kiss of Light is a rallying cry for equality, inclusion and freedom, reminding us that joy, curiosity and creative rebellion build a better world. 

Commissioned and presented by Vivid Sydney and Sydney Opera House
Co-curated by Dr. Sally Gray, Gill Minervini and Micheal Do
Animated by VANDAL
Soundtrack by Stereogamous

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    With thanks to

    The Australian Queer Archives, Melbourne

    The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 

    Artbank, Sydney

    The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

    The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

    Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne

    Brian Sayer and Garry Sommerfeld, photography

    William Yang photography

    Plan your visit

    Venue information

    Our foyers will be open 90 minutes pre-show for Concert Hall and Joan Sutherland Theatre performances, and two hours pre-show for Western Foyer venue performances. Refreshments will be available for purchase from our theatre bars.

    All Sydney Opera House foyers are pram accessible, with lifts to the main and western foyers. The public lift to all foyers is accessible from the corridor near the escalators on the Lower Concourse and also in the Western Foyer via the corridor on the Ground Level (at the top of the escalators). Pram parking will be available outside the theatres in the Western Foyer.

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