A Museum Opening Under a Cloud, and Flavin's Green Light in Bilbao

Powerhouse Parramatta, a vast new arts and technology museum in Sydney, opens this weekend — on 7 November — without the chief executive who spent years leading the project, after Lisa Havilah stepped down in August amid allegations of misconduct.

The unveiling is shrouded in those allegations, and The Art Newspaper's Australian reporter Elizabeth Fortescue has been following both the building and the scandal. She spoke to our colleagues on the paper's podcast, hosted by Ben Luke, about what the museum actually delivers — and about the conduct questions hanging over its birth.

It is an awkward opening, to put it mildly. A flagship institution arrives with its builder gone and its reputation under review. The facts are simple: a huge new museum, a departed chief executive, and a cloud that no amount of opening-weekend spectacle will disperse quickly.

What is happening to heritage in southern Lebanon?

The podcast's second segment turns to southern Lebanon, where heritage sites continue to suffer damage from Israeli military activity despite a supposed ceasefire in the war between Hezbollah and Israel.

Sarvy Geranpayeh, who has been talking to politicians, heritage professionals and artists about the destruction, joined Luke to describe the situation on the ground. The picture that emerges is bleak: agreements on paper, rubble in practice. For a region dense with historic buildings and cultural memory, the losses compound with every incident.

Why does a 1966 fluorescent work still matter?

The episode's Work of the Week is greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green) (1966) by Dan Flavin — a landmark work for the American artist, first shown at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.

The title is Flavin at his driest: a dedication to Mondrian, the modernist who famously banished green from his palette, honoured with a room-filling composition of the very colour he refused. Fluorescent tubes, in Flavin's hands, stopped being hardware and became drawing in light.

The work is one of the highlights of Dan Flavin: Some Light, which opens at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, on 11 November and runs until 4 April 2027. That is a five-month institution-level commitment to an artist who turned commercial lighting into Minimalism's most seductive medium.

Lauren Hinkson, curator for collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, is organising the Bilbao show and discussed the work with Luke. Her institution's involvement signals the show's weight: this is a collection-backed retrospective, not a loan assembly.

Where does each story go next?

For Parramatta, the immediate question is governance: whether the new museum can establish credibility while the misconduct allegations are unresolved. For Lebanon, the trajectory depends on whether the ceasefire — supposed, at least — begins to hold for stones as well as people. And for Flavin, the coming months belong to Bilbao, where nearly five months of fluorescent light will test whether a 1966 dedication to Mondrian still glows as brightly for audiences in 2025.