The Guardian | Sydney Biennale 2024: Armageddon is met with joy and subversion in epic art feast

The trauma of colonisation and war, and an impending environmental apocalypse, are themes that permeate the 2024 Biennale of Sydney. But there are also glimpses of promise and joy to be found in the free art festival, which this year draws 96 artists and collectives from 50 different countries.

 

Titled Ten Thousand Suns, the 24th iteration of the major exhibition spreads across six Sydney venues, including two which are stars in their own right: the recently reopened Artspace in Woolloomooloo’s historic Gunnery; and the White Bay Power Station, a cavernous building that has lay largely dormant for more than 40 years.

 

At the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, the first work visitors will encounter is Elizabeth Dobbie’s photograph of First Nations dancer Malcolm Cole dressed up as Captain Cook for the 1988 Mardi Gras – another work whose business is, as Costinas puts it, “inverting and subverting power structures to challenge colonialism.”

 

On the ceiling above, the Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita’s vivid paintings on canvas resemble long luxuriant carpet runners, reinterpreting Bali’s traditional Kamasan paintings, usually done by men of men, to celebrate women’s spiritual and sexual empowerment instead.