It seems weirdly appropriate that the 2024 Sydney Biennale entitled Ten Thousand Suns should star Doreen Chapman – a Manyjilyjarra woman born deaf and, as a result, non-verbal – whose gentle, abstract paintings are just about her only way to reflect on a life in the Pilbara where the sun has beat down on her for 19,000 days, and a town like Marble Bar is often the hottest place on earth.
As a result, Chapman is the only one of the 96 artists and collectives featured this year to appear in every venue (apart from the Sydney Opera House sails, which, as AAD revealed exclusively, already feature Gail Mabo’s bamboo star maps). It’s an odd decision though, for many will just walk past her single, standard-sized works in a Biennale that often prefers the outsize, unable to decipher the random patterns and strange mentions of both the NAB and ATMs on different canvases. Is she criticising capitalism? Her Spinifex Hill art centre says that they’re just motifs from her life, like aeroplanes and brush turkeys, which have also been known to appear. In the West, she sells out shows.
But those suns make more obvious appearances elsewhere. For, while the curators Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero have undoubtedly achieved a Biennale that’s as strong on aesthetics as it is on ideas – a frequent failing of the breed – they’re definitely encouraging an interrogation of concepts, such as our scorched environment, and the cultural survival area, where apocalypses ranging from bushfires to colonialism via the AIDS epidemic have and are threatening many lands and groups.
But, rather than offering only downers, with Latin America in their hearts, the curators seek out the carnivalesque, the catharsis that lifts the hearts of the downtrodden.
So a sixteen metre tall image by Dylan Mooney of Aboriginal AIDS victim Malcolm Cole as a cross-dressing Captain Cook hangs in the 35 metre tall walls of the White Bay Power Station – part of the NSW Government’s $100m dollar revitalisation of the 100 year old building. Nearby, a mere 15 metre-long light work by Darrell Sibisado takes his reinterpretation of Bardi riji work on pearl shells to new extremes. And that maverick from Indulkana in the deserts, Kaylene Whiskey, has been given her pitjaried head to create a giant, 3D television version of her contemporary media Seven Sisters story. Wonder Woman flies overhead.
But it’s just possible that an artist whose ideas are big but pictures small – such as Destiny Deacon – gets lost in White Bay.
Returning large, a Rea poster dominates the newly-refurbished Artspace building in Wooloomooloo, shouting the word SUN in the Gamilaraay, Biripi and Wailwan languages of her ancestry. Equally loud is Gordon Hookey’s work at the Art Gallery of NSW which rudely cries out ‘Fuck Off French Fried Frog Face’, a subtle reference to atomic testing in the Pacific. But then the curators seem to have a penchant for the rude – Juan Davila has innumerable large explicit nude paintings, of both sexes. And Tracey Moffatt has a penchant for the noisy – her 2007 film Doomed captures Hollywood at its most rip-roaringly disastrous.
A queer sensibility is frequently about us – Willy Yang’s old photos of the boys in the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Troupe fit the bill. Odd then that they share space at the Chau Chak Wing Museum (in the Sydney Uni grounds) with a rare appearance Over East of Carrolup children’s art from the 1940s. Thirteen delicate watercolours show how these Stolen Noongar boys were guided by their visiting mothers to remember and capture the Country they’d been removed from so delightfully. Equally moving, at the MCA, a Robert Campbell Jnr work shows the last sunset before that 1788 invasion.
The most crowded room of Indigenous art is at the AGNSW and, counter-intuitively, involves disasters in Darwin. Pauline Kerinauia recalls her Tiwi father’s stories of its 1942 bombing, still regularly danced as well. Magdalena Meak weaves her memories of the time that East Timor was equally attacked. And, previously unannounced, Rover Thomas pops up with his famous Cyclone Tracy image to remind us that the disasters went on. Calmly, in the middle of this chaos, James Eseli has an aeroplane headpiece from his Badu Island dance tradition.
Then above them all, the Dutch couple, Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum intrigue with simple white ceramic forms that seem to vaguely represent aircraft. In fact they are inspired by the surrealistic planes painted by René Magritte in 1937, when he learned of the bombardement of the Basque town Guernica. A Weaver Hawkins painting from 1949 is equally surreal with tottering towers and a mushroom cloud looking so perfect as the pilot who caused it to be stands confused on the shadows of its blasted victims
War and peace; fire and flood; The Kimberley and Holland, Latin America, Africa and lots of the Pacific – there’s much divergence and coming together if you’re prepared to make the connections as you tour the Sydney Biennale. It was a lot easier for me as Costinas and Guerrerro were my guides for a long day’s outing.
