With almost a year to go until the doors open on the next Biennale of Sydney, its Artistic Director, Hoor Al Qasimi has named 37 artists to participate,  of which 20 come from First Nations communities around the world. This preponderance is no doubt encouraged by the Biennale’s Visionary Partner, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain which funds their First Nations Curatorial Fellow. The second such appointment has fallen to Bruce Johnson McLean, formerly of the National Gallery in Canberra and the Queenaland Art Gallery. Johnson McLean is from the Wierdi people of the Birri Gubba Nation, and his job now is to work with the Indigenous artists over the year to realise their newly commissioned artworks.

Twelve of the 20 are Australian:
Carmen Glyn-Braun is a Kaytetye/Arrernte/Anmatyerr installation artist from Mparntwe
Dennis Golding is a Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay mix making artistic commentaries on the urban scene
Elverina Johnson is a Gungganji and Gimuy Walubara Yidinji artist from Yarrabah (FNQ) whose work crosses into music and performance
Frank Young and the Kulata Tjuta Project are from the APY Lands
Gunybi Ganambarr from the Ŋaymil clan of the Dhuwa moiety of the Yolŋu nation in Arnhemland – bark adventurer extraordinaire
John Harvey and Walter Waia are Torres Strait Islander artists from Saibai Island whose film ‘Mudskipper’ captures cultural knowledge and the rising sea levels threatening their island
John Prince Siddon, a Walmajarri man from The Kimberley satirises Australia in his wild paintings
Nancy McDinny tells of the despoliation of her Garrwa/Yanyuwa lands on The Gulf
Warraba Weatherall is a Kamilaroi/Brisbane artist who reflects on the interpretation of archival repositories and structures
Wendy Hubert is a Yindjibarndi Elder, cultural custodian, artist and linguist from the Juluwarlu Art Group in WA painting cultural landscapes
Yaritji Young is a Senior Law Woman from Amata in the APY Lands painting her Tjala Tjukurrpa – the Honey Ant Story

other first nations artists come from Guatemala, New Mexico and from the Secwepemcúlecw people of Canada.

And the non-Indigenous Aussies selected are the witty wordsmith Abdul Abdullah, Lebanese-Australian photographer, Marian Abboud, and the time-based art team of Merilyn Fairskye and Michiel Dolk.

The title selected for this 25th Biennale of Sydney by Sheihka Hoor Al Qasimi is Rememory which comes from the writing of American author Toni Morrison. This theme invites artists and audiences alike to revisit, reconstruct and reclaim histories that have been erased or overlooked. Through Rememory, the Biennale hopes to explore how the act of remembering—whether personal, familial or collective—can shape identity, belonging, and community.

In 2026, the Biennale will extend across Sydney including key cultural venues in Western Sydney, adding the Lewers Bequest Gallery at Penrith to Campbelltown, but excluding the Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay – perhaps because it now charges an entrance fee.

Hoor Al Qasimi is the President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, the independent public arts organisation in the UAE founded by her in 2009 and has been the Director of Sharjah Biennial since 2000. Her father is Sharjah’s ruler. She was appointed as the President of the International Biennial Association (IBA) in 2017 and was the Artistic Director of the sixth Aichi Triennale in 2025, becoming the first person to be chosen for that role from outside Japan. She has also co-curated exhibitions at leading organisations around the world, including the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

In Sydney, her statement of intent is: “Rememory connects the delicate space between remembering and forgetting, delving into the fragmented and forgotten parts of history, where recollection becomes an act of reassembling fragments of the past—whether personal, familial, or collective. Through the defiant act of sharing, seeing, and understanding, the artists and cultural practitioners I’ve invited to participate explore the hidden effects of history and how it continues to shape the present in an evolving and consuming conversation. Rather than focusing on linear storytelling, I hope to highlight how we can become active participants in retelling our collective stories by revisiting and reinterpreting past events”.

The BOS runs from 14 March – 14 June 2026 and is free.

Meanwhile the Art Gallery of NSW has also gone Indigenous. Under the bold headline, “Colour is transformative, magical and political”, the exhibition High Colour is, they claim, “an immersive exploration of local and global Indigenous perspectives on colour”. Amazingly, it was inspired by Richard Bell’s 2012 work Colour theory (also the name of a documentary on Bell) “to consider the role of colour in creating contemporary interpretations of Indigeneity”.

High Colour brings together First Nations artists belonging to or working in Australia, the Great Ocean region, and North America. “For these artists, colour is identity, belonging, history and inheritance. This is the first exhibition that considers the Gallery’s rich First Nations collection within a global Indigenous curatorial discourse”.

Big words, that are barely justified on the Gallery’s walls. Apart from a bit of pink to transform a gorgeous kangaroo skin cloak into a gay statement that sits nicely with Dylan Mooney’s extensive series of herograms, Queer, Blak & Here; and Jonathon Jones long unseen witty lightwork, ‘Blue Poles’ which I managed to get on a cover of an art magazine in 2004, there’s remarkably little colour. Indeed, the brightest thing around is the power orange wall behind the oddest of juxtapositions – a threatening spit hood by Karla Dickens beside Esme Timbery’s delicate little shell ‘Sydney Harbour Bridge’. Not that Garawan Waṉambi’s marvellous brown geometric bark or Gulumbu Yunupiŋu’s brown starred ‘Ganyu’ aren’t beautiful artworks. And not that Lisa Hilli’s recovery of an old PNG photograph to highlight the anonymous women in it, juxtaposed with a gnarly carved tree-fern figure from the Ni-Vanuatu people of Ambryn Island don’t say much about the religions of the Pacific. For Hilli’s setting is “where the first missionaries landed” on the Duke of York Islands to upset the native cults like those still inhabiting Ambryn. Unmentioned is that I have been to a place just like Hilli’s just across the water in New Britain where the signpost apologised that the missionaries landing there had arrived at a time of starvation, and had therefore been eaten!

The AGNSW also challenged its own High Colour claims with another exhibition round the corner called ‘Telling stories with colour and line’ featuring a mighty Frank Stella abstraction that features at least eleven brilliant colours! But we’re all eagerly awaiting the Gallery’s big show of Yolŋu power which arrives in mid-June. Now that will be ‘First Nations First’ after their recent High Court land rights victory and surely should be “transformative, magical and political”!