25th Biennale of Sydney, “Rememory”

Most biennales tend to overpromise on their engagement with their host city. The sheer size of the 25th Biennale of Sydney—featuring more than eighty artists and collectives spread across five far-flung venues—pins its success to the workings of local government, an underfunded arts sector, and the city’s public transport. While every curator of the biennale is obliged to work with these constraints, Hoor Al Qasimi appears to have incorporated them into the ethos of a show that features many voices with no clear heroes. Her theme is “rememory,” a neologism taken from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), where memory takes on a pictorial, collective form, and history becomes something you “bump into” even if erased or forgotten, and especially if repressed.1 An exhibition of memory work, then, where past meets present in the act of looking.   

The theme is most incisive at Campbelltown Arts Centre, a squat, heavy building located inside a sea of carparks and lawns. Dread Scott’s Lockdown (2000/26) is immediately affecting: eleven black-and-white photographs of incarcerated men in the United States return your gaze, and are paired with edited, overlapping recordings from interviews with the men, speaking knowingly about the judicial and carceral system to which they are subjected. Unlike digitally printed images, these gelatin silver prints suspend light rather than reflect it: the photographs held my eyes on the men’s expressions, purposeful and open.

In the same space, Helen Grace unboxes Justice for Violet and Bruce (1980/2022), an archive of photographs taken in 1980 during protests in Sydney in support of Violet Roberts and her son Bruce, who were convicted of murdering their abusive husband and father, Eric Roberts, in 1976. The tentativeness and vulnerability in the body language of the protestors and their uncertain, youthful smiles almost converse with Scott’s portraits. There is a material conversation happening too, with the grayness of Grace’s digital reprints, which are pinned to the walls as sheets of TIFF files in place of the contact sheets with which these photos would have started life. Both works prompt the idea of the artist as witness, seemingly working from an instinct to record and then to revisit, rather than a coherent methodology.

Nearby video works also bring us face to face with a continuous carceral reality, each registered differently in memories and on bodies. Code Black/Riot (2025)—a collaborative project between Hoda Afshar, Vernon Ah Kee, and Behrouz Boochani, with support from the First Nations advocacy group Change the Record—occurs across four large screens in a darkened room, where Indigenous children in North Queensland illuminate, in disturbing detail, their experiences of detention. We see only half faces and hands set against brightly colored backdrops, with occasional scenes set on rivers and in trees, but the prosaic clarity of their accounts of physical and psychological torture, solitary confinement, the brutality of prison protocol, its architecture of surveillance, and their encounters with ghosts, has a power that exceeds artistry.

Their testimonies mirror Boochani’s first-hand experience, described in a short accompanying text, of being held in of one of this country’s offshore asylum seeker prison camps on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. It is a theme carried further in the film Asylum of Our Dreams (2026) by the Lebanese artists and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, who tell the story of a friend, Nazih, who decided to remain in Lebanon rather than make a perilous boat journey to Australia. The group that did leave were detained and rerouted to another of Australia’s offshore detention centers, this one on Christmas Island. Collectively, the works are a powerful indictment of how a carceral regime is embedded in the past-present anatomy of the nation. I couldn’t help imagining these works breaking out of the gallery and into the bloodstreams of Sydney: projected on walls in shopping malls and on the sides of tall buildings, at the airport, on train platforms.

At the Penrith Regional Gallery, located at the foot of the Blue Mountains, the focus shifts to land rights and cultivation. Amid films of remembered independence struggles, and photos of journeys to left-behind homelands, one artwork stands out: Kulpreet Singh’s Indelible Black Marks–I (2021–22), nine sheets of rice paper, precisely punctured, burnt, and stained with letterpress ink (think Rorschach test, blotting paper, printing error). The works speak to the Indian Kisan Andolan, or Farmer’s Movement—effective mass protests that began in 2020 when agricultural reforms were proposed by the Narendra Modi government that would have left farmers more exposed to the whims of corporate greed—but it’s the qualities of charred, parched, and smeared paper that make you stop and look. Singh, the son of a farmer who participated in the protests, offers memory embedded in material, a rarity in an exhibition stitched together by explanatory wall texts and informational imagery.

Much of the art here wants to speak to the urgencies of the present in mood and subject, on which the accompanying captions leave no doubt. Take, for instance, the Mumbai-based collective CAMP, who are showing their technically impressive film Sydney Opera (2026) at White Bay Power Station, a barely changed relic of the last century given over to the biennale for the second time. Their “cinematic survey of Sydney and its occupants” is said to collapse “public and private worlds,” returning “agency to its city denizens.” But their celebrated voyeurism turns into choreographed cuteness here, where invited people perform songs and monologues for the zooming attentions of a CCTV camera’s “patrol function” mounted on top of the venue, looking around itself in a circle. What if they had allowed the panorama camera to sink into the city as a real (and haunted) place where people live? They might have got closer to achieving the caption’s promise: a transformation of “the ancient, colonial and commercial immensity of the city into a domain of living, breathing, resisting, and remembering.”

The question it raises is an old one: How do exhibitions become a social form of knowledge, creating the conditions to send and receive a political message? In such a politically charged, scrutinized, and disarranging moment,2 witnessing becomes one method by which art can attempt to bring some sense to collective history. But if the role of the exhibition becomes the gathering of these attempts, we must accept, as Morrison’s concept of “rememory” suggests, that repressed histories will interrupt without warning or curation.