5 November 2026 | Craft + Design Canberra

Join us to formally launch the 2026 Craft + Design Canberra Festival and celebrate the opening of 4 exciting exhibitions in the Craft + Design Canberra Gallery and Civic Square. 

7 + 8 November 2026 | Various Locations

Step inside the studios of Canberra’s makers and discover the creative practices of local craftspeople, designers, artists and arts organisations. Proudly supported by home.by.holly.  

13 - 15 November 2026 | Ainslie Arts Centre

The Undercurrent Design Market brings together over 50 accomplished makers from across Australia, showcasing contemporary work in jewellery, glass, ceramics, textiles and diverse creative mediums.  

6 + 7 November 2026 | Belconnen Arts Centre

Design and dance collide in a double-bill exploring the interplay between body, identity and cross-cultural exchange. ALTER is an Austral/Asian collaboration presented by dancers living with and without disability - offering a beautiful hybrid of ephemeral visual art and dance, illustrating the power of dissent through lived and imagined realities.  

6 November 2026 | National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

In line with the Craft + Design Canberra Festival theme of Dissent, this conversation asks whether we are measuring the things that matter most. As Canberra grows and changes, are we optimising for the metrics that are easier to count, or for the things that make our city a better place to live? This discussion will explore how the measures we choose influence the places we create, and whether it is time to broaden the way we define success. 

23 October – 15 November 2026 | M16 Artspace

Bespoke Utopia presents Canberra artists whose practices embrace the principles of slow design that is grounded in care, material knowledge and long-term thinking. Linking global conversations around sustainable design with Canberra’s rich craft history, the exhibition invites audiences to consider how design shapes everyday life and how thoughtful creative practices can challenge fast, disposable production models.  

12 – 13 November 2026 | Canberra Museum and Gallery

BOLD Dissent is a two-day conference featuring leading dancers, designers and thinkers from across Australia and the world bringing a focus on dissent. Shaking up the way we create and present performing arts and the ways in which organisations and artists can create more accessible and inclusive environments for the future.

9 – 15 November 2026 | Across Canberra

Explore Canberra's award-winning Architecture with new landmark buildings and ingenious sustainable residences through the Australian Institute of Architecture's ACT Chapter tour program. 

15 + 22 + 29 November 2026  | Such and Such

Such and Such presents Clubb Chess, a three day interactive exhibition celebrating contemporary artists and designers through the lens of a centuries old board game, encompassing the festival theme of ‘Dissent’. This exhibition brings together multiple industries across Canberra including architecture, furniture design, art, music and hospitality on the 15th, 22nd and 29th November 2026. 

5 – 25 November 2026  | Canberra Glassworks

Delightly revives endangered scientific glassblowing skills, transforming salvaged laboratory glass into plasma-illuminated vessels. Harriet Schwarzrock creates objects whose luminous behaviour shifts with viewer proximity, taking science out of the museum. Darkened, subtly interactive installations offer multi-sensory wonder, merging curiosity with playful public engagement in glass and light. 

7 – 8 + 14 – 15 November 2026 | National Film and Sound Archive

Digital Dissent is an interactive showcase of innovative microgames exploring dissent, presented by Canberra Game Developers Association (CanDev) and hosted by the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA). Play the games, then join Digital Dissent in Discussion to hear local designers reflect on how Canberra’s game design community embraces dissent.  

5 November – 12 December 2026  | Craft + Design Canberra

EMERGENCY: Signal, Repair, Adapt brings together artists and designers working across ceramics, glass, textiles and media to examine what it means to make objects in a time of disruption. A major exhibition that affirms the power of creative practice to imagine alternatives where established systems have failed. 

7 November 2026  | Craft + Design Canberra

Join curator Stacy Jewell and exhibiting artists from EMERGENCY | Signal, Repair, Adapt for a shared conversation exploring resilience, transformation and repair. 

7 + 14 November 2026 | Lakeside + City

In a spirited act of dissent against the boundaries of public space, Localjinni presents two projected night walks through Canberra’s Civic Centre. Led by local artists these saunters reclaim the right to roam and creatively reimagine the city after dark.  

5 November – 12 December 2026  | Craft + Design Canberra

The National Robert Foster Metal Prize exhibition celebrates 15 finalists from across Australia who are questioning, reinterpreting and evolving the possibilities of metal as a contemporary practice. 

5 November – 6 December 2026 | Civic Square  

NEST | Design for the Displaced Future is a major public art commission for the 2026 Craft + Design Canberra Festival, responding to the theme of Dissent. Located in Civic Square, the temporary public art installation brings together sculptural works exploring the universal instinct to nest and belong in a changing world. 

12, 13 + 14 November 2026 | City

Nightwalks with Teenagers is created with local youth, who plan, design and lead public walks through Canberra at night, exploring the neighbourhood with members of the community. It is focused on the power of walking together, bringing together teens and adults to have a unique social experience in shared spaces. 

7 November 2026 –  30 January 2027 | Canberra Contemporary

Quietly Seething: Fate, Fury and Transmutation  is an immersive handcrafted installation inviting visitors to sit within a dazzling embroidered space while listening to the anonymous and deeply personal confessions of 60 female identifying and AFAB (assigned female at birth) people sharing their experiences of feminine rage. 

5 – 22 November 2026 | Canberra Airport

Raw and Refined presents new work by established contemporary jeweller Phoebe Porter, highlighting the origins of the materials she employs and the labour of making. The exhibition celebrates the handmade as an act of creative dissent, challenging consumerism, mass production and conventional notions of value through thoughtful, enduring design.

5 – 15 November 2026 | Australian National Botanic Gardens

Revitrification transforms discarded architectural waste glass into sculptural installations at the Botanic Gardens, in the process researching circular methodologies that give new value to landfill-bound materials. The project embodies dissent, rejecting the convention that discarded glass has reached the end of its useful life in our designed city.    

5 November – 6 December 2026 | Various Locations

Featuring works by Yamile Tafur Rios, Brock Willis and Danish Quapoor, Signs of Dissent | Graphic Interventions transforms public space through site responsive artworks responding to the Festival theme of Dissent. Drawing on cultural identity, environmental narratives and quiet acts of resistance, each artist challenges everyday perspectives and reimagines the visual landscape of Canberra. 

5 November – 12 December 2026  | Craft + Design Canberra

Senden Blackwood's hand-carved granite vessels challenge the culture of speed, mass production and disposability. Through painstaking craftsmanship, geometric forms and the enduring presence of stone, his work celebrates slow making, material intelligence and the lasting value of objects shaped by time, patience and the human hand. 

5 November – 12 December 2026 | Craft + Design Canberra

A quiet act of dissent against the conventions that have long diminished craft, Soft Matter presents ceramic sculptures that challenge social and material hierarchies, embracing softness as a site of strength, complexity and possibility across the boundaries of craft, sculpture and still life. 

15 November 2026 | Black Mountain

Walk on Country with Tyronne Bell (Ngunawal ) through the tracks and trails of Black Mountain, gaining a First Nations understanding of bush foods, artefacts and stone tools, with panoramic views of Canberra along the way. This tour reads the landscape through Ngunawal knowledge held and carried forward since long before Canberra was planned, offering the 2026 Festival theme of Dissent as continuity of culture on Country. 

5 July – 13 December 2026 | Tuggeranong Arts Centre

In dissent against the decline of the Murray Cod, Tuggeranong Arts Centre invites you to join collaborative community weaving sessions, using natural fibre and recycled materials to complete a large scale textile sculpture. Hear First Nations stories and learn about the environmental conservation efforts surrounding this threatened and culturally significant species.