Sydney Festival brand collaboration with Nadia Odlum

Sydney Festival’s brand celebrates creative voices of our city. This year’s brand has been developed in collaboration with artist Nadia Odlum.

Nadia Odlum

Nadia Odlum is a Sydney-based artist whose work explores how we move through and make sense of urban space. Through painting, sculpture and public installations, they transform the patterns and materials of the city into playful, abstract forms that invite curiosity and connection.

Odlum’s practice celebrates the vibrancy of shared environments, revealing the city as a living network shaped by interaction, imagination, and the everyday choreography of human experience.

With a practice spanning continents, mediums and communities, Odlum brings a research-driven yet playful lens to the public realm. Their work invites audiences to look again at the familiar and discover meaning in the flows and frictions of city life. This collaboration brings that perspective to Sydney Festival’s visual identity, reflecting a city in motion, shaped by those who live, move and dream within it.

Sydney Festival design collaboration

Featured in Sydney Festival’s 2026 brand, Odlum’s work Cumulative Choreography (2023) captures the pulse of the city in motion.

Pencil and spray paint translates the layered experience of moving through the city into optical vibrations, textures and form.

Photo: Jacquie Manning

Artist Statement

“The materials, symbols, structures and rules of the city are evidence of continuing human attempts to cohabitate. Walking through the city, I move through this material residue, my perception layered with all my present and past selves.

In the studio, I process this complexity through the layering of patterns, mediums, textures and colours. One work bleeds into the next, in messy optical vibrations. Symbols and shapes flow in from the city, translating personal perception into new abstract languages.”

- Nadia Odlum