The 24th Biennale of Sydney, titled Ten Thousand Suns, is this year’s major international arts festival in Sydney. It is the largest free contemporary art event of its kind in Australia and is on at the Art Gallery of NSW, Artspace, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, UNSW Galleries and at the recently restored White Bay Power Station.
Now in its 50th anniversary year, there will be exhibitions and events throughout Sydney. The 2024 edition will feature 96 artists and collectives from 50 countries and territories including New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Guatemala, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Niue, Trinidad and Tobago and Ukraine. Until 10 June biennaleofsydney.art
Biennale of Sydney venues
28 Robert St, Rozelle
Inspired by pop culture alongside the ‘dot’ iconography of the Central Desert Yankunytjatjara artist Kaylene Whiskey’s work is titled Kaylene TV. It invites audiences into a giant TV with human-size cut-outs of icons such as singers Cher and Dolly Parton, as well as Whiskey’s own hybrid Black superheroes. American Chinese artist and Grammy nominated music video director, Andrew Thomas Huang, has created his first ever sculptural work. A great tiger will be suspended in the Turbine Hall, wearing a mask referencing Xiwangmu, Queen Mother of the West in Chinese mythology.
Peruvian artist Cristina Flores Pescorán has created a large-scale textile sculpture, Abrazar el sol (Embrace the sun), inspired by her own healing journey from a skin cancer condition, which exposed her to invasive examinations, biopsies, surgical interventions and medical observation for almost two decades.
Orquídeas Barrileteras (Orchid Kite), the first all-female group of kite makers from Guatemala’s Barrilete Festival, consists of 22 women spanning three generations. Stretching 5m wide, their lovingly and intricately designed kites are handmade using cloth, paper, bamboo, tissue, string, and natural materials.
Trevor Yeung’s mushroom lights exist on a closed-circuit system which, despite appearing to tumble organically, is entirely fabricated and closed off. Reminiscent of a child’s night light, a symbol of both security and naivety, these installations reflect Yeung’s sense of being a social interloper. (Also at Artspace)
140 George St, The Rocks
The foyer wall of the MCA will be transformed with a commission created by Iraqi-Swedish- American artist of Kurdish descent Hayv Kahraman for the Biennale of Sydney. Drawing parallels between water, migration and the processes of Ebru marbling, the artist’s new work explores the violence and vulnerability experienced by undocumented migrants travelling to Australia via sea. Sydney-based multidisciplinary artist and musician Serwah Attafuah’s digital creation unfolds in a near-future Ghana, drawing viewers into an Afrofuturistic vista contrasting colonial remnants with utopian hope, with a narrative that is propelled by burning slave castles, sinking colonial ships and formidable female warriors. The sculptures of Malaysian artist Anne Samat sculptures are modelled from the artist’s relationships with friends or family and form sites of personal devotion and care.
43-51 Cowper Wharf Roadway, Woolloomooloo
On the exterior of The Gunnery building, r e a’s large banners depict the words for sun in the Gamilaraay, Wailwan and Biripi languages of the artist’s parents and grandparents. The work continues inside Artspace in the Ideas Platform, here interjected by SILENCE = DEATH and LAND = RIGHTS layering dual messages for audiences to decipher. A series of paintings and graphics created by Ukrainian artist Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, based in Kyiv and created in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. Shahmuradova Tanska draws upon Ukrainian history and folklore, blurring the line between form and mirage through dreamy figures that explore a molten landscape of collective memory, grief and violence.
Cnr of Oxford St and Greens Rd, Paddington
Quandamooka (Minjerribah, North Stradbroke Island, Queensland) artist Megan Cope confronts social, geographical and metaphorical boundaries through military-style maps that contest the myth of Terra Nullius and replaces colonial titles with her Jandai language and its cultural names and landmarks.
Art Gallery Rd, The Domain, Sydney
This is a new drawings series by Roma artist Robert Gabris will create a ‘Garden of Catastrophe’ in an expression of empowerment and agency. The works react against a European anthropological gaze that formed part of the objectification and discrimination faced by Roma people throughout Europe.
Tāgata Moana art collective Pacific Sisters, a collective of Pacific and Māori fashion designers, artists, performers and musicians present Mururoa, addressing the effects of nuclear testing in the wider Pacific and its long-term damaging environmental and physical impacts on Moana peoples and Supa Suga.
Big Chief Demond Melancon is part of a more than 200-year-old culture known as the Black Masking Culture of New Orleans. Part of a suit worn by the artist for the Mardi Gras parade, Big Chief Demond Melancon’s Africa depicts Zulu warriors drawing connections between African and First Nations traditions.
Acclaimed artist Frank Bowling’s Australia to Africa, part of his seminal ‘Map Painting’ series, merges postcolonial geopolitics with abstraction. Bowling is known for layering canvases with stained or washed colours so they appear flooded with light, creating luminous, near-illusory cartographies.
University of Sydney, University Place, Camperdown
Citra Sasmita began researching the patriarchal roots of modern Bali which broadly narrates male heroism and depicts women as romantic decorations. Sasmita uses traditional Kamasan painting to reclaim the female figure as an active de-colonial agent challenging the exotic aesthetic heritage of Baliseering.
Badu Gili – meaning ‘water light’ in the language of the traditional owners of Bennelong Point, the Gadigal – is a free daily Biennale of Sydney experience that explores First Nations stories in a spectacular six-minute projection on the Opera House’s eastern Bennelong sails. Watch the sails illuminate with Badu Gili: Celestial, a new projection celebrating the work and stories of two female First Nations artists from Australia and New Zealand, created in collaboration between the Opera House, Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. The sails will also feature a work called Echo (2024) by Archibald Prize winner Julia Gutman.
