The trauma of colonialism and war and the impending environmental apocalypse are themes that permeate the 2024 Sydney Biennale. However, there are also moments of hope and joy at the free art festival, where 96 artists and collectives from 50 different countries participated this year.
The 24th iteration of the major exhibition, titled Ten Thousand Suns, spans six venues in Sydney; two of which are stars in their own right: the recently reopened Artspace in Woolloomooloo’s historic Gunnery; and the White Bay Power Plant, a massive building that has remained largely dormant for more than 40 years.
It hasn’t been an easy journey for White Bay. The New South Wales government spent $100 million on improvements to the area but scored an own goal at the new Rozelle junction headed by the power station. Visitors grappling with nightmarish traffic jams that are supposed to alleviate, not exacerbate, and the discovery of asbestos both there and at Rozelle Parklands, which has closed the nearest light rail stop, may feel like they have lived through their own personal doom. when they get there.
Political hyperbole dared to suggest that the power station’s Turbine Hall would rival the Tate Modern building in London. But while London’s Turbine Hall is all gleaming steel and lacquered floors, White Bay revels in mid-20th-century mechanical mayhem and remnants of industrial grime.
However, the power plant is larger and, with its eight-story void, allows for extremely ambitious works such as the work of Orquídeas Barrileteras, Guatemala’s first group of female kite makers; and Andrew Thomas Huang’s polymer-and-steel sculpture The Beast of the Jade Mountain: Queen Mother of the West dominates the Turbine Hall in all its faux-jade, car-paint-colored glory. The dimly lit cul-de-sacs also offer visitors countless little surprises, including small clusters of LED-lit sculptures by Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung and gossamer knits by Peruvian artist Cristina Flores Pescorán.
Cosmin Costinaș, senior curator of the Berlin House of World Cultures, and Inti Guerrero of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, have curated a massive biennial. They told Guardian Australia at Tuesday’s media preview that humor and subversion were the exhibition’s artistic foils, although many of the works were genuinely bleak or hopeless and in some cases born out of harrowing experiences.
“It’s less about victimization or traumatic representations and more about using art to appropriate structures of oppression like colonialism,” Guerrero says.
There is no better example of this destruction than Yankunytjatjara artist Kaylene Whiskey’s exuberant new installation, Kaylene TV, commissioned by the biennial. Whiskey created a huge, terrifying walk-in television set in White Bay that was entertained by female pop culture icons, including a black Wonder Woman and several black mixed-race superheroes.
“The infiltration of popular culture…is iconically appropriated by it,” Costinas says. “He presents to the public a world full of vision that reverses power relations.”
Guerrero says humor and the urge to party against the impending Armageddon are central to this year’s biennial theme. In a space adjacent to Whiskey’s installation, Peter Minshall’s video works do not so much commemorate the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as celebrate with images of a giant human-driven mushroom cloud made of what appears to be white tulle dancing through the streets of Trinidad looks like. annual carnival.
“The forefront of this biennial is that joy and celebration are not just forms of escape; these can be forms of life affirmation and resilience,” says Guerrero.
Depictions of nuclear war and the cost of war on human life and the environment appear in all five locations.
The recently reopened Artspace has expanded its gallery spaces to three floors with 10 artist studios and many of its original bricks, wooden beams and columns from 1900 restored.
Here you’ll find Ukrainian artist Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s response to Russia’s invasion of her homeland through eight oil paintings on canvas that are at once beautiful and shocking, disembodied heads suspended in the air amid pastel swirls of pain and despair.
At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, False Flag (2021-23), an installation by Netherlands-based artists Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum, focuses on the devastating bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish civil war.
Fiberglass models of futuristic aircraft inspired by Rene Magritte’s 1937 painting Le Drapeau noir (The Black Flag) hang from the gallery’s ceiling, and some are brutally realistic rather than fantastical when viewed from this new era of drone warfare. Monochrome images of the Basque mountains play on the back wall, and voices can be heard calling across the landscape. They name the figures depicted in Pablo Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece Guernica.
In the same space, childhood trauma also permeates the works of Indonesian artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih (better known as Murni), who died in 2006 at the age of 39.
The self-taught artist, a survivor of child sexual abuse and a domestic worker since the age of 10, adopted the flat plains and bold figures of traditional Balinese painting to openly express her sexual experiences and the social and gender restrictions she unflinchingly challenged during her time. his life was cut short.
Sharing the same space as Murni are four extraordinary figures created by the New Zealand-based Pacific Sisters collective. A multidisciplinary art practice located at the intersection of Maori Pacific and queer identity, the collective practices what it calls “fashion activism” in which clothing is an expression of power rather than adornment.
But behind the extravagant displays looms nuclear trouble. MuruMoa, a work in which pig teeth, horse bone and volcanic rocks are stitched into silk, satin and seashell, takes its name from one of the French nuclear testing sites conducted in the Pacific from 1966 to 1996, providing protection for what was done. ruins.
In an adjacent space, Australian artist Bonita Ely presents a terrifying family tableau in her installation C20th Mythological Beasts; At Home with the Grasshopper People. Created in 1975, the work depicts people as both victims and perpetrators; A grotesquely constructed nuclear family reclines on a sofa, surely watching the nuclear end of the world on television.
Ely’s second work at the biennial – at the University of NSW Art and Design campus in Paddington – is more personal but equally compelling. Interior Decoration In 2013, the artist created a miniature battlefield by repurposing early 20th-century furniture from his parents’ bedroom.
Ely, who was exposed to domestic violence as a child, builds a moat and watchtower out of art deco-era headboards, dressers, and chests of drawers. His mother’s Singer sewing machine has been repurposed as a machine gun. The rattling of the machine would provoke unprovoked rage in Ely’s father, a machine gunner in the second world war affected by PTSD.
The first work visitors will encounter at the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum is Elizabeth Dobbie’s photograph of First Nations dancer Malcolm Cole dressed as Captain Chef for the 1988 Mardi Gras. Another work whose job, in Costinas’ words, is: “to invert and subvert power structures to challenge colonialism.”
On the ceiling above, Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita’s vibrant paintings on canvas resemble long ornate carpet runners and reinterpret Bali’s traditional Kamasan paintings, usually done by men, to celebrate women’s spiritual and sexual empowerment.
For gallery goers who can’t get enough of this apocalyptic feeling, Tracey Moffatt’s 2007 video collage Doomed is being shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the biennial. The collection of disaster scenes, drawn from nearly every film that has dared to depict the end of the world in the past century, packs a fascinating and sometimes hilarious punch.
Standing serenely on the opposite wall from Doomed is a work by Robert Campbell Jnr, painted five years before his early death in 1993. In Aboriginal Camp at Sunset, Ngaku artist of the Dunghutti nation re-imagines the final dusk his people witnessed before encountering their own lives. its end: the invasion of 1788.
The MCA exhibition, which covers six venues, is perhaps the last exhibition to be visited; This is not because it is less gripping, but because it ends on a more uplifting note.
Anne Samat’s cheerful Unbreakable and Unsaid Unsaid #2 dominates the entire wall of the gallery; It transforms rattan sticks, kitchen and garden tools, children’s plastic toys, brightly colored beads, ceramic and metal ornaments and hand-woven tapestries into works of art. Large totem honoring family lineage and mythology.
The transcendental place from which this Malaysian artist draws inspiration is perhaps best explained in the wall text: “His sculptures are modeled on the artist’s relationships with friends and family, creating areas of personal attachment and interest. “Approaching each figure is designed to evoke the feeling of a warm embrace.”
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The 24th Sydney Biennial, Ten Thousand Suns, is open to visitors until 10 June at White Bay Power Station, Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Sydney Chau Chak Wing Museum, Art Gallery of New South Wales. University of NSW Art and Design galleries Paddington and Artspace in Woolloomooloo