From the pearl-shell designs of Darrell Sibosado, a Bard man from the Kimberley, to a colour-saturated mural by the Yuwi, Torres Strait and South Sea Islander man Dylan Mooney and the intricate body tattooing of the Baiga people in India by Mangala Bai Maravi — these are just a few of the 14 First Nations artists from Australia and around the world brought to the 2024 Biennale of Sydney by the event’s “Visionary Partner”, Fondation Cartier. The legendary jeweller is supporting the arts festival through its Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain — the company’s art museum at its headquarters in Paris.
Another key element of the partnership is the appointment of a First Nations curatorial fellow. The first recipient: Tony Albert, a Kuku Yalanji artist from Queensland who is well known for his confrontational expropriations of tropes about Aboriginal people and culture. He contributed an important work to the 2020 Sydney Biennale titled “Healing Land, Remembering Country”, a massive installation in a specially built greenhouse on the Cockatoo Island site. Albert is, like everyone involved with the sprawling event, working almost around the clock to ready the work of nearly 100 artists across six major sites in Sydney.
“It’s one of the wonderful things about biennales and triennales and through opportunities like the commissions from Fondation Cartier,” he says. “We get to dream big and execute projects that possibly wouldn’t happen outside of that scope.”
Albert’s role, among other things, is to help the 14 Fondation Cartier artists realise their vision. Most of them are new to the Biennale. A key part of his mission: “I can really be a conduit between the Biennale and the artists,” he says. “There’s an opportunity for engagement, particularly about cultural nuances, within the office and dealing with artists, that I think becomes really useful.
“You can do in one phone call what would take someone else a week,” he adds.
Albert joins the Biennale’s curatorial team, led by Berlin-based co-curators Cosmin Costinaș, who worked on the Venice Biennale in 2022 after 11 years at Para Site, the prominent arts centre in Hong Kong, and Inti Guerrero, who has curated exhibitions and institutions in Belgium, Ireland and the UK. The Biennale’s CEO is Barbara Moore, who is now overseeing her third iteration of the event.
The centrepiece of this year’s Biennale is one of the more spectacular refurbishments Sydney has witnessed in a long time. The enormous White Bay Power Station is familiar to anyone who travels west across the Anzac Bridge. The facility, built in the early 1900s, has lain fallow for decades. It has now been rehabbed and made fit for the public and will serve as the towering focal point of the 2024 Biennale, before becoming a permanent cultural hub as part of the redevelopment of the surrounding Bays West precinct.
The 24th Biennale of Sydney, “Ten Thousand Suns”, continues until June 10 at the White Bay Power Station, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, UNSW Galleries and Artspace in Woolloomooloo.
