It was an appropriately apocalyptic day for the preview of the 23rd Sydney biennale. The Colombian director José Roca has titled it rīvus, which means “stream”: a deep examination of all things watery, from the drowning of Pacific Islands to the loss of fishing cultures during the slow destruction of climate change. That Tuesday, as massive floods inundated eastern Australia, New South Wales authorities warned people to stay at home unless it was strictly necessary.
The show went on. And it was a soggy triumph. Constant rain during the eight-hour, six-venue marathon only added to the urgency of the message.
“Rivers, wetlands and other salt and freshwater ecosystems feature in the biennale … as dynamic living systems with varying degrees of political agency,” Roca has previously said. “Indigenous knowledges have long understood non-human entities as living ancestral beings with a right to life that must be protected. But only recently have animals, plants, mountains and bodies of water been granted legal personhood. If we can recognise them as individual beings, what might they say?”
There are many beautiful, worrying and enlightening answers to this question in the show’s 330 artworks – by 89 participants – and 400 events involving individual artists and groups from all over the world.
Rainwater washed down the high sandstone walls of the Cutaway at Barangaroo; vast installations were carefully protected from it. Down the road at Pier 2/3, Sydney-based artist Clare Milledge made a beautiful, large-scale silk tent housing hanging copper cauldrons, coils of shipping and climbing rope, suspended glass paintings and more things germane to her topic. Her installation, titled Imbás: a well at the bottom of the sea, imagined Sinnan, the goddess of the River Shannon in Ireland, who is said to have journeyed to a deep spring seeking wisdom, and from it she released poetry into the world.
The British-Finnish artist, composer and performer Hanna Tuulikki spoke about her new video, Seals’kin, which deals with mythical Norse selkies, who can transform from seals to humans, shedding their skin each time. In the myths, she said, humans would sometimes be abducted to the underwater kingdom orseals would become trapped on land after losing their skin. As Tuulikki studied the stories, she came to understand them as “mass bereavement allegories about loss and longing” in coastal communities. She will sing traditional shanties about them while she is here.
Indigenous Australian artists also have much to say at the biennale. Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough put together a video from kayak trips she took on the Macquarie River and adjoining waterways in Tasmania: it lies horizontal on the floor at the Curaway, with her kayak suspended and plastered with stickers of stones stolen and held in museums around the world – out of country. Once she received the biennale’s commission, Gough paddled without knowing her end goal, hoping the river would provide an answer. It was a risk, but at the end of the Mersey River, where it runs into the sea at Devonport, she found Native Rock. “The names gave me the clue,” she says. She researched the place and learned it was the site of a massacre. “The people of that region held a last stand at that rock,” she says. “There is no surviving family or any people from that region.”
Barkandji artist Badger Bates is a tireless waterways activist. At the Art Gallery of NSW, his black and white linocuts, based on the geography of tributaries and lakes of the Barka (Darling River) and the teachings of his Granny Moysey, have been blown up to meander around several walls. This serves as a background to an installation of carved canoes – one by Bates – and sculptures that highlight the river fish being killed by local industries that produce chemical waste.
At Barangaroo, The Great Animal Orchestra is a powerful audio-visual work of animal voices accompanied by bright electronic signals of their sounds. Here, sound is the focus, accompanied by something mesmerising to watch. “When people hear this kind of theme for life on earth and our relationship to that, they’re going to come away changed,” said Bernie Krause, a US musician and soundscape ecologist who worked with London-based collective United Visual Artists to make the artwork.
There is a lot to see at six venues across the city. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Slovenian artist and architect Marjetica Potrč presents a new work, The House of Agreement Between Humans and the Earth, a structure that examines the relationship between people and the natural world. This and her signature wall drawings tell the stories of two rivers: the Soča in Slovenia and the Galari (Lachlan River) on Wiradjuri country. And Chilean artist Paula de Solminihac has two wall hangings of printed ink and fine paper, across from scrawls of algebraic calculations.
Roca, the biennale’s director, had intended to minimise his carbon footprint by moving to Sydney for the duration of the show’s preparation. Two years of travel restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic minimised it even further and prevented his wife, a lawyer, from working. The end result is a diverse collection of artworks and a powerful piece of advocacy for our planet.
The Sydney biennale is on from 12 March to 13 June
