by The trauma of colonization and war, and an impending environmental apocalypse, are themes that run throughout Biennale Sydney 2024. But there is also a glimpse of promise and joy in the free art festival, which draws 96 artists and collections from 50 different countries this year.
Entitled Ten Thousand Suns, the 24th iteration of the major exhibition is spread across six Sydney venues, including two stars in their own right: Artspace in the recently reopened Woolloomooloo’s historic Gunnery; and the Báin Báin Power Station, a cavernous building that has been largely dormant for over 40 years.
It has not been an easy journey for Bân Bân. The New South Wales government plowed $100m into remedial works at the site, only to score its own target with its new Rozelle junction, which is dominated by the power station. With the serious traffic congestion it was supposed to relieve, not worsen – and the discovery of asbestos there and in the Rozelle Park Grounds, which closed the nearest light rail stop – visitors may feel as though they’ve gone through their own personal apocalypse at the time they get there.
It is a shame of political hyperbole to suggest that the power station’s Turbine Hall will compete with its London counterpart Tate Modern. But while London’s Turbine Hall is all steel and lacquered floors, White Bay is full of fun in its mid-20th century mechanical clutter and remnants of industrial gloom.
The power station is larger, however, with an eight-story void that allows works that are extremely ambitious in terms of scale, such as that of Orquídeas Barrileteras, the first group of women aviators in Guatemala; and Andrew Thomas Huang’s polymer and steel sculpture The Beast of Jade Mountain: Queen Mother of the West, which dominates Turbine Hall in all its fake car paint-stained glory. The dimly lit cul-de-sacs also have many things to surprise the visitor, including the small clusters of LED light sculptures by Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung, and the gossamer vines of Peruvian artist Cristina Flores Pescorán.
Cosmin Costinaș, senior curator at the House of World Cultures in Berlin, and Inti Guerrero from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium in Ghent, have curated a huge biennale. At the media preview on Tuesday, they told Guardian Australia that while many of the works are indeed bleak or desperate and, in some cases, come from humorous experiences, humor and prejudice are the exhibition’s artistic foils.
“It’s not so much about victimization or traumatic representations, but about using art to appropriate structures of oppression, like colonialism,” says Guerrero.
There is no better example of that tendency than Yankunytjatjara artist Kaylene Whiskey’s riotous installation commissioned by the biennale, entitled Kaylene TV. At White Bay, Whiskey created a huge lurid walk-in TV set, featuring her frolicking female pop culture icons, including a black Wonder Woman and some of her own hybrid black superheroes.
“She infiltrates pop culture … and appropriates it in an iconic way,” says Costinas. “She presents to the public a world full of her vision that reverses power relations.”
Humor and the urge to party in the face of pending Armageddon are central to this year’s biennale theme, says Guerrero. In a space adjacent to the Whiskey installation, video works by Peter Minshall appear to commemorate rather than commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with footage of a giant human-powered mushroom cloud made of what appears to be a white veil dancing on the streets during Trinidad. annual carnival.
“At the forefront of this biennale is the idea that joy and celebration are not just forms of escape; they can be life-affirming forms of resilience,” says Guerrero.
Representations of nuclear warfare – and the cost of war to human life and the environment – are also shown in five of the centres.
The recently reopened Artspace has expanded gallery spaces over three floors, with 10 artist studios and much of its original brick work, wooden trusses and restored columns from 1900.
There you will find the reaction of the Ukrainian artist Sana Shahmuradova Tanska to the Russian invasion of her homeland, through eight oils on canvas at the same time beautiful and disturbing ones hovering among a swirl of pastels of anguish and despair.
At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, False Flag (2021-23) – an installation by Dutch artists Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum – focuses on the disastrous 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, some of which are more realistic than fantastical when viewed from this new age of warfare. drone. On a back wall, monochrome footage of the Basque mountains plays, and voices can be heard calling across the terrain. They are naming the figures depicted in Pablo Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece Guernica.
At the same center, there is a childhood trauma throughout the work of the Indonesian artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, better known as Murni, who died in 2006 at the age of 39.
A survivor of child sexual abuse, and a domestic worker since the age of 10, the self-taught artist appropriated the flat plains and heavy verisimilitude of traditional Balinese painting to openly express her sexual experiences, and the societal constraints and gender that she challenged endlessly. cut short their lives.
Sharing the same space as Murni are four larger-than-life figures created by the New Zealand-based Sisters of the Pacific. A multidisciplinary arts practice at the intersection of Pacific Māori and queer identity, the collective practices what it calls “fashion activism”, where clothing is less a decoration and more a statement of power.
But behind the terrifying and terrifying displays, the nuclear scourge is looming. MuruMoa – a work of pig teeth, horse bone and volcanic rock stitched with silk, satin and shell – is named after one of the sites of the French nuclear tests carried out in the Pacific from 1966 to 1996, and is a custodian of what happen. remains.
In an adjacent space Australian artist Bonita Ely presents a macabre family tableau in her C20th Mythological Beasts installation; At Home with the Locust People. The work, created in 1975, shows people as both victims and perpetrators, a grotesquely raised nuclear family sitting on a couch watching a certain nuclear end of the world on television.
Ely’s second work in the biennale – at the University of NSW’s Art and Design campus in Paddington – is more personal but just as compelling. In Maisiú Intí 2013, the artist created a miniature battle out of restored early 20th century furniture in her parents’ bedroom.
Élí is a survivor of domestic violence as a child, and Élí builds a trench and a watchtower out of art deco era beds, wardrobes and cellars. Her mother’s Singer sewing machine is reimagined as a machine gun. The clattering of the machine would trigger an unprovoked rage from Ely’s father, a PTSD-affected machine gunner in the second world war.
At the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, the first work visitors encounter is Elizabeth Dobbie’s photograph of First Nations dancer Malcolm Cole dressed as Captain Cook for the 1988 Mardi Gras – another work whose purpose, as Costinas says, “reversing and equipping power structures to challenge colonialism.”
On the ceiling above, Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita’s vibrant paintings on canvas resemble a luxurious long carpet runner, reinterpreting traditional Balinese Kamasan paintings, usually done by men, to instead celebrate the spiritual and sexual empowerment of women.
For gallerists who can’t get enough of that apocalypse now, Tracey Moffatt’s 2007 video collage Doomed is screening as part of the biennale’s offerings at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Her collection of disaster scenes, taken from almost every film of the past century in its quest to depict the end of the world, creates a disturbing and sometimes funny effect.
On the opposite wall from Doomed is a work by Robert Campbell Jnr, painted five years before his untimely death in 1993. In Aboriginal Camp at Sunset, artist Ngaku of the Dunghutti nation reimagines the last dusk his people saw before they met. Doom Itself: The Invasion of 1788.
With six venues to cover, the MCA exhibition is perhaps best visited last, not because its hanging is less attractive but because it ends more aggressively.
An entire gallery wall is ordered with the brilliance of Anne Samat, Cannot Be Broken and Won’t Live Unspoken #2, to transform rattan sticks, kitchen and garden utensils, children’s plastic toys, brightly colored beads, ceramic and metal ornaments and handwoven tapestry into their place. an extensive totem honoring family lineage and mythology.
Perhaps the place of love from which this Malaysian artist draws her inspiration is clear in the wall text: “Her sculptures are based on the model of the artist’s relationship with friends and family and create sites of devotion and personal care. It’s designed to make you feel like you want to get a warm hug when you approach each real.”
-
The 24th Sydney Biennale, Ten Thousand Suns, is open until June 10 at White Bay Power Station, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, the NSW University Art and Design Galleries at Paddington and Artspace in Woolloomooloo
