For the 24th Kaldor Public Art Project in partnership with Art & About, celebrated UK artist Michael Landy created a major new work, Acts of Kindness, for Sydney. Acts of Kindness explored the meaning of kindness in today’s fast-paced world, focusing on the simple everyday gestures of compassion and generosity that occur throughout the city streets and often go unnoticed. Stories of kindness were collected from people across Sydney to form the basis for Landy’s ambitious new artwork. Landy created a 13-metre installation in lower Martin Place, mapping the Sydney CBD and indicating where the 200 stories of kindness were placed throughout the city streets.

Michael Landy is one of Britain’s best-known artists and is recognised as having created some of the most significant public art projects of the past decade. One of the Young British Artists of the 1990s, Landy became famous for his monumental project Break Down in 2001, in which he systematically destroyed all of his personal belongings, from his birth certificate to his car, in a former department store in London’s Oxford Street. Landy’s other major projects include Semi-Detached (2004) for which he reproduced his parents’ house to scale inside the galleries of Tate Britain, and Art Bin (2010) where he invited artists and members of the public to dispose of works of art, receiving contributions from fellow artists Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Gillian Wearing.

Landy’s works explore the experience of life in a consumer world, reflecting on contemporary values, from economic worth to the importance of human relationships. For Acts of Kindness, Landy adapted the visual language of mapped directions, store logos and urban street signage that characterise the commerce and business of the Sydney city streets, to present his own interpretation of the city, focusing on the social interactions of its inhabitants and their stories.