by FilmInk Staff
BRINGING TOGETHER LOCAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS ACROSS THE GREATER BLUE MOUNTAINS & PENRITH REGION
Superposition: a festival conceived for the Blue Mountains
26—29 November 2026 Dharug & Gundungurra country
The Co-Artistic Directors of SUPERPOSITION, Sam Watson-Wood (Friends with Strangers) and Thom Smyth (Unfunded Empathy), have announced the full program for the inaugural festival, unveiling four days of boldly immersive programming across exhibitions, special new commissions, live music and participatory works.
Set in the UNESCO World Heritage listed Greater Blue Mountains, SUPERPOSITION brings together local, national and international artists to create site-responsive works across Penrith, Katoomba, Blackheath, Mt Victoria, Medlow Bath and Wentworth Falls. At the intersection of art, music, nature, and community, the festival aims to thoughtfully engage with both the environment and contemporary issues.
The program has been curated along the Blue Mountains train line, to streamline access from Sydney. Local residents entering a Blue Mountains or Western Sydney postcode will receive 10% off all single tickets (not including Festival Pass).
Program highlights include:
- Roo Wave TV is programmed by Soda Jerk, an artist duo who make sample-based films with a rogue documentary impulse. Mount Vic Flicks will host a cinema transmission of nonstop nuggets from the Australian Roo Wave. Art film, ozsploits and artefacts from the un-canon of Australian culture streamed on the big screen. A wilding where cinephilia leaks into gutter rap and crunchy YouTube relics go head to head with masterworks and microhistories. Small joys and art giants. Where theft is a politic and the poor image is pious. Where the highbrow meets the lowbrow in the ecstatic horizon of the monobrow. he program will surf like a channel throughout the weekend and audiences are encouraged to drop in to ride the roo wave for short or longer stays. A single ticket serves as a pass for return visits all weekend.
- Back Room Cinema is an adult’s only season of queer moving image at Homo House: EO Gill’s new film The Wetting, Samia Sayed’s SHREDDED, Barbara Hammer’s landmark 1974 short Dyketactics, The Amateurist by Miranda July, and Garden Reflexxx’s Invade Iceland. Fifty years of film in a heritage hotel room.
● Block Party a street party curated by highly celebrated, Mountains-born alternative electro pop group Haiku Hands.
● MTNS Made, a curated selection of local projects, music, performance, visual arts and markets, including a live music program inside the adorable Rosey Ravelston’s Book Store, and new exhibition by Ben Toupein.
● Ace Mart, a late-night convenience store stocked with snacks, drinks and art, built by Ace House Collective (Yogyakarta) and RIFF RAFF ARI (Penrith). It’s the festival’s one-stop shop for life’s essentials: box office, infopoint, and a stop on the bus route. Cobblers, menders and makers take up residency across the weekend. Drawn from lumbung (shared resource, mutual care) and nongkrong (being present, no agenda), it’s a noticeboard for tickets, lifts and whatever needs passing between people — proof that a shop can still be a commons.
● Bimiibigang Gedumba (Welcome Katoomba) a Welcome to Country and Creation Story performance led by Gundungurra man Uncle David King, joined by a solo performance by Ngiyampaa, Yuin and Gumbangirr composer and violinist Eric Avery.
● Homo House, a creative takeover of Victoria & Albert Guesthouse with an immersive space full of art, performance and music. Featuring Homopleasure, the Taipei queer performance and art collective, joined by Betty Apple, in residence for the full run, a new work by artist and performer Hannah Bronté, a new installation work by artist Luke George and spacial designer Phaenomenon and a new installation work by queer Wiradjuri poet & artist Jazz Money.
● Accelerations, an event-driven encounter with invisible architectures by Joyce Hinterding and David Haines: electromagnetic forces, synthetic terrain, and the performers’ own sensor-mediated presence as speed core. A drift through radio-charged air, geological memory, and the hum of contemporary technologies.
● High Tea Dance, a garden party spectacular across the grounds and stables of the V&A, running day into night, featuring Ayebatonye, Annabelle Gaspar, Kilimi, Junior M, Lesbionica and Kemical SistaS.
● Blue Mountains Writers Festival presenting a program within SUPERPOSITION.
● Evening and social programming across the villages: late-night activations across Katoomba’s pubs and bars, karaoke at a secret late night location, a ghost tour of Mount Victoria with Paranormal Pete, and festival lunches including George Street RSL lunch at Frankie and Mo’s.
“We didn’t come to the Mountains to build something on top of what’s already here. We came because the artistic community here is extraordinary, and it deserves a wider frame and a wider audience.” – Sam Watson-Wood, Co-Artistic Director
A run of site-specific moments thread throughout the festival alongside the headline program: intimate ambient DJ sets at dawn and dusk across the Blackheath escarpment edge with sound artists Blake Lawrence and Ben Parangi; stargazing sessions at Linden Observatory; guided bushwalks connecting festival sites; mystic Angela Dix will be in a roving traditional fortune box delivering messages from beyond; and the Mount Vic Ghost Tour, a conducted evening walk through the village’s hauntings led by Paranormal Pete.
“This festival is a hopeful leap. The two of us building this from a belief that the conditions for change get made when people start making them, in community together, right now” – Thom Smyth, Co-Artistic Director
SUPERPOSITION has been built slowly over three years of sustained engagement with Dharug and Gundungurra communities, Blue Mountains artists, cultural organisations and partner venues, guided by Uncle David King and Aunty Leanne Tobin and a heavy-hitting advisory board.
“Culture is carried through long observation of landscape and movement – dawn, dusk and night each hold meaning, and story is present in the constellations, in bird movements, in flowering cycles, in the changing geology that shapes this place. Superposition has built itself around that same rhythm – dawn, day, dusk and dark – it comes from listening to Country properly. Come to Country, sit with it, don’t extract from it. Superposition artists and audiences are being asked to bring their stories, listen first, and let this place shape what they make together while they’re here.” – Uncle David King (Gundungurra) – SUPERPOSITION Advisory
SUPERPOSITION opens a temporary space inside the real world where communities and artists physically inhabit different ways of being: with each other, with time, with place, with pleasure, with loss – a hopeful invitation to bring a group, dive in and spend a weekend immersed in new experiences among UNESCO world heritage listed landscapes.
Image: Luke George & Phaenomenon ‘TETHER’
