{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/25th-biennale-of-sydney-review-from-the-margins/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":119371,"slug":"25th-biennale-of-sydney-review-from-the-margins","title":"25th Biennale of Sydney Review: From the Margins","excerpt":"Rememory, the 25th Biennale of Sydney, is a timely rumination on marginalised histories, but the context in which it takes place supercharges its potency","content":"\n

Rememory, the 25th Biennale of Sydney, is a timely rumination on marginalised histories, but the context in which it takes place supercharges its potency

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This edition of the Biennale of Sydney – titled Rememory and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi – arrives at a time when cultural festivals in Australia are under intense scrutiny. As has been the case with other largescale events, such as Adelaide Writers’ Week and Sydney Festival in January, an unprecedented level of attention and debate has been directed at the politics of the biennale’s curatorial approach, its programming of events and the social-media engagement of its participants. Since her announcement as artistic director, Al Qasimi, whose position as an internationally recognised curator is well established, has also faced calls by a former board member to step down over her pro-Palestinian views. 

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One of the consequences of this is that it moves the conversation away from the biennale itself: a timely and ruminative exhibition exploring marginalised, fragmented and repressed histories. Consisting of 143 works by 83 artists and collectives from 37 countries and territories, and on view across five venues in Sydney, Rememory references a word first used by Toni Morrison in her novel Beloved (1987). Al Qasimi describes this term as the ‘delicate space between remembering and forgetting’, and with a focus on diasporic and First Nations communities, ‘rememory’ becomes a method for reassembling or reclaiming the untold, the forgotten and the erased. 

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Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022), a videowork on display at Chau Chak Wing Museum, responds to the five million tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam during the Vietnam War, one third of which never exploded. The 58-minute narrative film follows Nguyet, a scrapyard worker who refashions salvaged weaponry into hanging sculptures, and who, on discovering they resemble the work of Alexander Calder, comes to believe she may be the artist reincarnated. It’s a stunning piece of filmmaking, one that reiterates not only how the trauma of war repeats across generations, long after the bombs have stopped falling, but how the materials of violence – the metal itself – can be repurposed as a method for healing. 

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Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Until we became fire and fire us, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Silversalt Photography. © and courtesy the artists
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Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s Until we became fire and fire us (2023–) sees a gallery space at Campbelltown Arts Centre transformed into an immersive installation. Here Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Americans of Palestinian descent, explore displacement, forced migration, haunting and the loss of Palestinian land. Ghostly figures with their arms outstretched, as if caught in motion, are printed on chiffon and hang suspended from the ceiling, gently swaying in the air. Drawings made by Abou-Rahme’s father in Jerusalem during the 1970s and 80s are also displayed on steel panels in the middle of the room, while a montage of text and video depicting plants, figures dancing and rolling ocean waves in inverted colours plays out across three channels. Sound is a crucial component of the work, which shifts from birdsong to melodies to pulsing bass notes that resonate in the viewer’s chest. Like Nguyen’s film, the past reaches into the present, but in this work memories of what has been erased are animated through an embodied and multisensory encounter. 

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At Penrith Regional Gallery on the edge of Western Sydney, Khalid Albaih exhibits newly commissioned photographs of Sudan that were contributed by members of Sydney’s Sudanese community (The Last Time, 2026), while Massinissa Selmani’s 1000 Villages (2015), a delicate work on lined exercise books, includes floorplans and drawings of a project undertaken by the Algerian Government during the early 1970s, a socialist building initiative intended to revitalise the country’s agricultural economy and later abandoned. As part of the Biennale of Sydney’s programme (in collaboration with Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain) to commission new work by 15 First Nations artists from around the world, John Harvey and Walter Waia present The Heart of the Universe (2026), a three-channel video that merges recent and archival footage of Saibai Island in the Torres Strait, a region especially vulnerable to rising sea levels. 

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Nancy Yukuwal McDinny, Jurlayarriyarri (Morning Glory), 2025 (installation view, White Bay Power Station, Sydney). Photo: Document Photography Courtesy the artist and Karen Brown Fine Art, Darwin
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However, by including so many ways of defining the theme – the material and political dimensions of labour, histories of acquisition and erasure, architectures of containment, for example – the works, and the venues, that make up the biennale start to feel somewhat disconnected from each other and, by extension, untethered to an overarching curatorial premise. This is especially evident at White Bay Power Station, where, as much as the site’s imposing architecture and machinery might be intended as an active participant, with pieces installed among steam turbines, control rooms and a 30-metre boiler, it often overshadows the works on display or siloes them off from one another. 

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The strongest venues are those where the conversation between the artworks builds towards a cohesive whole. The vast gallery at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Naala Badu building, for instance, brings together the electrifying 80-square-metre Ngurrara Canvas II (1997) – a painting by 40 Ngurrara artists created to support their Native Title claim over the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia – and Yaritji Young’s paintings inspired by the story of the tjala (honey ant) from the Amata community on the APY Lands. With vibrant brushstrokes layered on a rich mass of colour, Young traces the honey ants’ journey across her Country, their meandering ‘tracks’ escaping the boundary of the canvas, with paint spreading out onto the gallery wall (Tjala Tjukurpa [Honey Ant Story], 2026).

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Ngurrara Artists, Ngurrara Canvas II (detail), 1997, synthetic polymer on two-pass rubber cloth, 10 × 8 m. Photo: Felicity Jenkins. © the artists. Courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
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Abdul Abdullah’s three oil paintings, in the heightened style of the Renaissance, hang on the wall opposite Young’s (both artists’ works are labelled as new commissions for the biennale). Each of Abdullah’s paintings, made in 2025, depict a documented scene from the 2005 Cronulla riots, when rising Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment erupted in a paroxysm of violence directed at anyone of Middle Eastern or nonwhite appearance at a beach in Southern Sydney. Based on posed reenactments by groups of young men, Abdullah’s triptych is part memorial, part reactivation, which imbues each tableau with the surreal feeling of being both in and out of time. At a moment when Australia’s far-right party is surging in the polls, viewing these works together feels especially significant: they offer alternate ways of conceiving of ‘Australia’s’ land and collective history – perspectives outside of the dominant narrative of the ‘nation’ that are so often erased or ignored.

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Toni Morrison suggests that the concept of ‘rememory’ is necessary, because if we refuse to turn towards memories that we would prefer remained submerged, then we will continue to be arrested by them. For Morrison, memories stay present, even as, or especially when, we are not meant to remember them. And with the ongoing forced displacement of millions of people across the Middle East, and the unabashed return of revanchist politics, far from being overwhelmed by our present moment, the context in which Rememory takes place supercharges its potency.

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25th Biennale of Sydney: Rememory, Various venues, Sydney, through 14 June

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From the April & May 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

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