Biennale of Sydney

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀ Robert Gabris

The series The Garden of Catastrophy is an expression of empowerment, symbolising the reclamation of agency over one’s own narrative and identity. Each drawing challenges centuries of racism, discrimination and exoticisation experienced by the Roma people throughout Europe to this day.

Pressing against heteronormative assumptions, Robert Gabris’ drawings present a free-flowing identity more accepted within Roma culture. This self-described chaos isn’t a force of destruction, but rather an agent of transformation and rebirth – a metaphor for the ever-evolving identities and stories of the marginalised. Central to Gabris’ work is a critique of the Eurocentric anthropological discourse that has historically objectified and dehumanised Roma bodies.

Through the fragmented portrayal of the q***r Roma body, the drawings depict a garden of healing wherein the ‘other’ grows prodigiously. Symbolising ancestral wisdom, the insects that populate the garden navigate adversity with tenacity, just as the Roma people have endured the trials of history and colonisation.

Image credits: Left to right: Robert Gabris, Becoming An Insect, 2023; A Moment before You Die, 2023; Deadly Nightshade, 2023; In the Garden of Catastrophy, 2023. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and produced in collaboration with Phileas - The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport. Courtesy the artist © Robert Gabris. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photograph: Christopher Snee.

🎉 We’re thrilled to be a finalist for Project of the Year at the Sydney Awards with Placemaking NSW! 🙌

Congrats to all the amazing projects, especially Football Australia Women’s World Cup winners for their impact on women’s sport. We’re honoured to be among such inspiring initiatives.

Huge thank you to our team, partners, and Placemaking NSW CEO Anita Mitchell for reviving White Bay Power Station, Wangal. Your support has been incredible!

Thank you to everyone who nominated and voted for us. We’re excited for the future and committed to transforming Sydney with art!

Here’s to more collaborations and celebrating our city’s creative spirit! 🌟

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀ Robert Campbell Jnr

In Aboriginal Camp at Sunset, Robert Campbell Jnr paints an imagined scene of a group of Aboriginal men gathered the evening before the arrival of the First Fleet on the shores of Botany Bay. The sun, setting on their final hours of true freedom, retains energy, embodying Campbell’s unique ability to hold pain and pride in a delicate, defiant balance.

Campbell emerged as a singularly talented and incisive artist in the 1980s, his work recalling designs found on the insides of possum-skin cloaks from south-eastern Australia, and the patterned engravings of Aboriginal shields, clubs and boomerangs. His graphic style drew upon the patterning of traditional Ngaku designs to depict the stories of his people and the ongoing impact of colonisation.

Many of Campbell’s figures feature a red tie-like oesophagus, which evokes the X-ray technique used in Arnhem Land rock paintings, where the internal organs and bones of native animals and spirits are depicted. One rock painting from the Madjedbebe region illustrates a European rifle with a bullet in its barrel. Expressing the ongoing relationship between Indigenous people and the natural and spiritual worlds, Campbell seamlessly integrates ancestral artistic conventions with a contemporary style.

Image credits: Robert Campbell Jnr, Aboriginal Camp at Sunset, 1988. Courtesy of Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and the Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art, Boorloo/Perth © the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, Museum of Contemporary Art. Photograph: Hamish McIntosh.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀ r e a

In March 1987 a poster began appearing on the streets of New York City. All black, bar a single pink triangle, it read SILENCE = DEATH. Aware that their own increasingly urgent conversations regarding the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic were not reflected in broader discourse the Silence=Death Collective, led by Avram Finkelstein, had created one of the most iconic slogans of activist history.

In the wake of the 2023 Voice referendum, q***r Gamilaraay/Wailwan/Biripi artist r e a has taken Finkelstein’s poster as inspiration to parallel the underlying politics that align both q***r and blak bodies. On the exterior of The Gunnery building, r e a’s large banners depict the words for sun in the Gamilaraay, Wailwan and Biripi languages of the artist’s parents and grandparents. The work continues inside Artspace in the Ideas Platform, here interjected by SILENCE = DEATH and LAND = RIGHTS layering dual messages for audiences to decipher.

r e a has positioned blak, q***r power as unavoidable and immutable as the rise and fall of the sun, the light at the end of tunnel.

The text on the Banners and walls translates as ‘sun’ in three languages:
YARAAY: Gamilaraay
DHUNI : Wailwan
TOONAU: Biripi

Image credit: r e a, GARI (language), 2024 (exterior). Commissioned by Biennale of Sydney and Artspace, in collaboration with r e a to create a safe space for reflection. Courtesy the artist © r e a. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, Artspace. Photograph: Document Photography.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀ Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano

Neither wild, native, nor domestic, foxes are a city’s strange neighbours – moving under the cover of darkness they traverse the unmapped spaces between public and private spaces stealthily yet confidently.

Inspired by the fox’s stalking nature, artists Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano engage with the blurring of human and non-human worlds through Britz & Mitte. Painted with both artists wearing hyperrealistic fox costumes and using replica fox paws as brushes, the piece is painted in soot not unlike the coal dust that would have once coated White Bay Power Station.

Making a home of the in-between spaces, as a fox does, the work muddies the boundaries between the playful and bleak, the untamed and methodical.

Using their fox alter-egos to bridge the gap between lost natural and industrial worlds, Halilaj and Urbano pay tribute to the many layered geographies of urban landscapes. Appearing as if it were a series of cave paintings, the work imagines a past which calls out through history like a fox screams in the night.

Image credits: Álvaro Urbano and Petrit Halilaj, Britz & Mitte, 2023. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous assistance from Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and James Lie and assistance from Accion Cultural Española. Courtesy the artists © Álvaro Urbano Petrit Halilaj. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, White Bay Power Station. Photograph: Document Photography.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀ Peter Minshall

Peter Minshall’s principal practice has been in the art form known as mas; a performance art developed for the Carnival of Trinidad combining costume, masque, wearable-kinetic-sculpture, and dance. From the late 1970s into the 2000’s Minshall and his collaborators produced a masband, a carnival ensemble, for participation in the annual Carnival of Trinidad. Over the years thousands of band members have been involved in Minshall’s especially vital and narrative presentations. Minshall was the Artistic Director for the opening ceremonies of three Olympic Games: Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996), and Salt Lake City (2002)

Bedecked in ostrich feathers and garish golden glitter, Adoration of Hiroshima, a character in the masband The Golden Calabash: Princes of Darkness and Lords of Light, was created by Minshall for the 1985 Carnival of Trinidad. Referencing a Balinese devil mask and the halos of religious European iconography, the work combines the spectacular with the grotesque in an admonishment of the monstrosity of the nuclear bomb, both feared and coveted by nations for its destructive power. In the summer of the same year Minshall presented the Adoration of Hiroshima as part of an anti-nuclear march in Washington D.C. marking the 40th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mancrab, featured in the centre screen, is a character from the masband River, first presented by Minshall at the Carnival of Trinidad in 1983. In the story of River the character of Mancrab, empowered by technology, embodies humankind’s greed and lust for dominance. Coveting a river as the site for his factories, Mancrab seduces the river’s people and their ruler, Washerwoman, by using colours that he spreads upon the water – the “colours” being a metaphor for the materialistic fruits of industrial progress.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀ Pacific Sisters

Known for their multidisciplinary arts practice and fashion activism, the mana wahine (women of strength) who comprise the Pacific Sisters collective, founded in Auckland in 1992, have embraced Māori, Pacific and q***r identities to weave Moana-based customary art and cultural practices into contemporary art.

Renowned for their philosophical or ‘kaupapa-driven’ frock ethos, which envisions clothing less as adornment than as a statement of power, each Pacific Sister aitu (avatar) has a unique story.

MuruMoa, named for one of the sites of the French nuclear tests conducted from 1966 to 1996, guards what is left of a post-nuclear world, protecting motu (lands), moana (oceans) and tagata (people).

Sup’ia Suga, believer in pono (honesty), manaakitanga (kindness and generosity) and ataahuatanga (supa-fabulous), is described as ‘part Wonder Woman and part Superman, and all girl power’. Encouraging each of us to take responsibility for our own actions, Sup’ia Suga is here to save the day.

Tapu Tinana embodies Nephi Tupaea’s personal journey back to her whānau (family group), and Kaitiaki with a K wears an obsidian-like videotape cloak in lieu of natural fibres. An obsolete material, the videotape ripples as if alive.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀ Pauline Yearbury and Jim Yearbury

An important practitioner in Māori modernist art, Pauline Yearbury was dedicated to the preservation of ancestral knowledge. In 1943, she became one of the first two Māori women to study at Elam School of Fine Art, Auckland, and would go on to spend much of her career tutoring younger artists.

In collaboration with her husband Jim Yearbury, Pauline Yearbury created incised Rimu wood panels detailing the swirling stories which constitute a rich Māori mythology, the back of each labelled with a description of the scene it depicts. From tales of love and war to the movement of the sun, Yearbury has captured the intricacies of her culture by combining traditional Māori carving with her geometricised forms.

Verso inscriptions from left:
Warrior Slaying Taniwha: ‘According to Māori mythology, the whole land was once populated by these dreadful creatures which usually took the form of giant lizards or fish and were in constant combat with man.’
How Maui Made The Sun Slow Down: ‘In early times when the days were shorter and the nights were longer, Maui, legendary hero of the Māori, was able to capture the sun and thus slow its progress across the sky.’
Hinemoa & Tutanekai: ‘Hinemoa was a maiden who lived on the shores of Lake Rotorua. Her lover Tutanekai lived on the lake island Mokoia and at night played his flute to guide her to his home. Hinemoa’s people beached all canoes in an attempt to prevent the lovers meeting. But Hinemoa swam the lake in darkness guided by Tutanekai’s music. After her swim she bathed in the warm pool Waikimihia (now known as Hinemoa’s pool), and was found there by Tutanekai.’

Image credits: Left to right: Pauline Yearbury, Warrior Slaying Taniwha, c1967–75; How Maui Made The Sun Slow Down, c1967–75; Hinemoa & Tutanekai, c1967–75. Presentation at the 24th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with assistance from the Chartwell Charitable Trust. Courtesy Collection of Russell Museum – Te Whare Taonga o Kororāreka © Russell Museum. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photograph: Document Photography.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀ Pauletta Kerinauia

At the height of the Second World War, the Japanese pilot Hajime Toyoshima, returning from the bombing of Darwin in 1942, crash-landed on Melville Island on the same morning that 21-year-old Tiwi man Matthias Ulungura was out hunting. Pretending that the handle of his axe was the barrel of a gun, Ulungura told Toyoshima to ‘stick ’em up’ and delivered him to RAAF guards, who were stationed at Bathurst Island; the Tiwi Islands had been identified as a crucial line of defence by the Australian military. Ulungura was the first Australian to take a Japanese prisoner of war on Australian soil.

In 1982, the now legendary Ulungura welcomed the delivery of his granddaughter Pauletta Kerinauia. Kerinauia grew up hearing the stories of the significant contributions Tiwi people made to the war effort. Her work explores the immense impact that the bombings in Australia’s Top End had on her community – in particular, the Darwin bombing, which has become an iconic Tiwi yoyi (dance). Kerinauia provides insight into the living cultural narratives of the Tiwi people, told through song, dance and painting karri parlingarri kapi ningani (from creation time to today).

Image credits: Left to right: Pauletta Kerinauia, Bombing of Darwin, 2023; Bombing of Darwin, 2023. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from a grant from Open Society Foundations and generous support from Vicki Olsson. Pauletta Kerinauia. Courtesy the artist and Jilamara Arts and Crafts Association © Pauletta Kerinauia. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photograph: Document Photography.

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Image credit: From left: Saule Dyussenbina, Achievements of National Economy, Fountain of Friendship of Peoples of the USSR (Moscow, Russia) (wallpaper), 2023. Gordon Hookey, F**k off French Fried Frog Face Frick, 1995. Breda Lynch, Cake Bomb, 2016–21. Weaver Hawkins, Atomic Power, 1947. Photograph: Daniel Boud.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀ Özgür Kar

Between the court jesters, noblemen, priests, and farmers who populate medieval art, dances a procession of the dead. This chorus line of skeletons, long-limbed and anonymous, is known as Danse Macabre, or Dance of the Dead; an allegory for what was a newly emerging understanding of universal morality in the Late Middle Ages.

Languorously delivering a song of desire and despair, Özgür Kar’s skeletons ruminate on the seemingly imminent demise of this life and world with the same unnerving nonchalance as the prancing spectres that have haunted the paintings, frescoes, manuscripts and nightmares of human beings since time immemorial.

Yet Kar’s skeletons are as emotionally vulnerable as they are withdrawn, doing away with both the camp-ness of cartoon and the grotesqueness of death, their lilting songs and frank soliloquies lean towards existentialism teetering, not yet falling in. Presented in the Boiler House of White Bay Power Station, where coal was once converted to heat, the work asks if what was meant to keep us warm might soon leave us cold beneath the same ground that it was hewn from.

Image credit: Özgür Kar, Death’s Horn, and the Birds, 2024. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous assistance from Mondriaan Fund and SAHA Association. Courtesy the artist © Özgür Kar. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, White Bay Power Station. Photograph: Document Photography.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀ Orquídeas Barrileteras

Every year on a Guatemalan soccer field beside the local cemetery, each grave freshly swept and crowded with carefully arranged flowers, dawn breaks on more than 50 immense kites just moments from flight. Legend has it that 200 years ago the Guatemalan town of Sumpango was plagued by errant spirits. In desperation, the townspeople visited their local healer for counsel. His advice was that the sound of large paper kites (barriletes) slicing through the air would scare off any aggravated ghosts.

To this day, 1 November – All Saints’ Day – is marked by the annual Festival de Barriletes Gigantes, when immense kites are flown to honour the dead. Hand-made with a specially crafted bamboo frame, the vibrantly coloured kites take roughly 40 days to assemble. Depicting anything from religious iconography and economic struggles to specific family stories, the barriletes are closely tied to the Indigenous Mayan culture within Guatemala. Traditionally built and flown by men, the Orquídeas Barrileteras is the first female group of kite makers in Guatemala, established in the post-war period when the Mayan population was recovering from The Guatemalan Genocide during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996).

Each barrilete stays flying for only a short period of time before floating back to earth – no less beautiful, as with a life, for the brevity of its time in the sun.

Image credit: Orquídeas Barrileteras, Strengthening Deaf Culture, 2023. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Courtesy the artists © Orquídeas Barrileteras. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, White Bay Power Station. Photograph: Document Photography.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀ Nikau Hindin, Ebonie Fifita-Laufilitoga-Maka, Hina Puamohala Kneubuhl, Hinatea Colombani, Kesaia Biuvanua, Rongomai Grbic-Hoskins

Bound together by the tides of history, tradition and the sea itself, the Indigenous people of Tahiti, Hawai’i, Aotearoa, Tonga and Fiji have spent tens of thousands of years beneath the same stars.

Long before European colonisation, Māori ancestors, understood to be shared across Te Moana Nui a Kiwa (The Great Ocean of Kiwa), used knowledge of the constellations to spread over a third of the Earth’s surface. Known as celestial navigation, this wisdom was recorded in star maps throughout the islands. As well as surveying the ocean, these maps delineate time and seasons through tracking solar and lunar cycles.

Led by Māori bark-cloth maker Nikau Hindin, Aumoana is a collaboration between a generation of makers from Tahiti, Hawai’i, Aotearoa, Tonga and Fiji. Over 12 pieces, Aumoana uses the visual language of each culture to share symbols, stories and knowledge. Made of cloth hand-crafted from the bark of the paper-mulberry tree (ngatu in Tonga, kapa in Hawai’i, masi in Fiji, aute in Aotearoa and Tahiti), the work is a monumental effort in cultural revitalisation and an investigation into the material potential of the plant and the abundance of learning offered to each other from within diverse community relationships with the environment.

As Hina Kneubuhl describes each cloth is made with “the same love that births children…powers the tireless turning of careful hands toward the soil…toward the collecting of earth and plant pigments…cloth that envelops individuals and communities in ancestral wisdom and love, the cloth upon which the world turns”.

The Manu Aute (kite and bird) that hang between these cloths were traditionally used by the Māori people to divine the outcome of a battle, to communicate with distant kin, and to celebrate the dawn of a new year. In Aumoana they again call out to their people, memorialising what has been lost and honouring what endures.

Image credits: Nikau Hindin, Ebonie Fifita-Laufilitoga-Maka Fungamapitoa, Hina Puamohala Kneubuhl Kihalaupoe, Hinatea Colombani, Kesaia Biuvanua, Rongomai Grbic-Hoskins, Aumoana, 2023-24. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier our l’art contemporain with generous support from Creative New Zealand. Courtesy the artists © Nikau Hindin, Ebonie Fifita-Laufilitoga-Maka Fungamapitoa, Hina Puamohala Kneubuhl Kihalaupoe, Hinatea Colombani, Kesaia Biuvanua, Rongomai Grbic-Hoskins. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, White Bay Power Station. Photograph: Document Photography.

If you're in Paris, pop over to KADIST with Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero on September 4 for their double book launch! 📚

During this FREE event, the artistic directors of the 24th Biennale of Sydney will discuss their latest publications, ‘Ten Thousand Suns’ and ‘What to Let Go?’, which both focus on the intersections of contemporary art, cultural discourse, and socio-political narratives.

📅 Wednesday, September 4, 2024
🕒 6:30-8pm
🔗 https://kadist.org/program/double-book-launch-by-cosmin-costinas-inti-guerrero/
Free access

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀️ Nádia Taquary

With her back turned to the camera, a Black woman sways gently in the dark, a set of ornaments at her hip rattling as she walks. She wears balangandãs – charms representative of the Afro-Brazilian cultural fusion that emerged in the aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade in Salvador de Bahia, the first capital of Brazil (1549–1763).

Worn by enslaved women and held together by a pencas de balangandã, a kind of hook or chain referencing the shape of a slave ship, each balangandã protected its wearer from misfortune through the symbolism of orishas, spirits in the Yoruba religion of West Africa and several communities of the African diaspora. Having travelled across the Atlantic, these spirits made a home in the Americas and, centuries after their arrival, would inspire the work of artist Nádia Taquary.

Taquary’s gilded sculptures adorned with bronze, gold and glass beads pay tribute to and celebrate the complex heritage of her Afro-Brazilian culture. In Dinka Yemanjá, with its vibrant blue glass beads and veiled in cowrie shells, Taquary depicts Yemanjá, a water deity who is the artist’s most closely held spiritual muse. Like the balangandã jewellery, Yemanjá, as the guardian of women and the patron of oceans and rivers, can hold the pain and poetry of her migration with the same grace as those whom she protects.

Image credits in comments

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀️ Ming Wong

Ming Wong presents gender, culture and class as acts of performance. Using video, digital imagery and installation, he reinterprets iconic films and characters from world cinema, using himself and other performers to play multiple roles in foreign languages.

Reimagining Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film On the beach, Wong’s poster interrogates the ideas of nuclear demise and waning hope that underwrite the famously theatrical film. Starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire, much of the story focuses on the beaches of Melbourne where those who have survived nuclear fallout await their inevitable death in the wake of a third world war. In Wong’s reimagining, titled If you never see another motion picture in your life, the melodrama of the source material is mingled with that of drag performance.

The apocalyptic 1959 film was produced at a time when Australia’s remoteness still dominated Euro-American imaginings of this country. Through Wong’s radical reinterpretation, the emotional resonance of On the beach is amplified rather than diminished. His playful manipulation prioritises emotional authenticity over faithful replication – how the end-of-days may look is dwarfed by the enormity of how it will feel.

Image credit: Ming Wong, If you never see another motion picture in your life, 2024. Courtesy the artist © Ming Wong. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photograph: Christopher Snee.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀️ Megan Cope

People of the Sand and Sea (Yoolooburrabee), the Quandamooka community have lived in Moreton Bay across the archipelago of islands including Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) for more than 25,000 years.

Disrupting concepts of time and geography, Quandamooka artist Megan Cope works over military maps that recall the myth of terra nullius. Her ongoing series After the Flood weaves social, geographical, and metaphysical stories, reclaiming landscapes with future tide lines of 5-metre sea-level rise, and replacing colonial titles with those of her people’s Jandai language. Each map, glowing with crystalline blue tides, returns cultural layers and memory over landmarks and places renewed with dual histories and a shared sense of place.

An act of decolonial cartography, at a time when entire lands and peoples across the earth are being reconfigured by climate change, with Quandamooka Country itself also vulnerable, Cope’s work is both a remembering of the past, a steadfast endurance of the apocalypse, a reimagining of ocean currents and future islands.

Image credit: Megan Cope, After the Flood III, 2024. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery © Megan Cope. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, UNSW Galleries. Photograph: Jacquie Manning.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀️ Mauroof Jameel & Hamsha Hussain

Hewn from the reefs that ring the atolls and islands of the Maldives, 26 coral stone (hirigaa) mosques and compounds dot the crystalline shorelines of a nation that may well be under water by 2050. Architecturally unique, the building’s interiors feature intricate timber and lacquer work alongside the hirigaa bricks and carving. Integrating Maldivian artforms and construction techniques, each structure speaks to the Indian Ocean rich in visual, material, and cultural exchange.

Still used for community worship to this day, the coral mosques embody a history of coral stone construction that extends as far back as 300 BCE, when the local people practised Buddhism. Informed by the carving techniques used as far as the Swahili Coast of East Africa, the aesthetics and crafts of the Buddhist period were adapted in the transition to Islam in roughly 1153 CE. In this way, each mosque represents a cultural metamorphosis wherein local materials informed centuries of creative and spiritual innovation.

In the face of ecological calamity, the mosques are symbolic of millennia of cultural transformation, documented here for posterity. With time, each of these buildings may well be drowned by the sea they were carved out of, ground into sand and washed onto shores as yet, unimagined.

Image credits:
1. Mohamed Imran, Orb of Intimacy, 2023. Courtesy of Gadheemee Collection, Maldives. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, UNSW Galleries. Photograph: Jacquie Manning.
2. Left to right: Mauroof Jameel and Hamsha Hussain, Hirigaa, 2024. Courtesy the artist © Mauroof and Jameel. Mohamed Imran, Entwined, 2023. Courtesy of Gadheemee Collection, Maldives. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, UNSW Galleries. Photograph: Jacquie Manning.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀️ Maru Yacco

In Maru Yacco’s Sydney parade, silhouetted figures appear like a troupe of dancers on a stage. Playing with ideas of hyper-masculinity and exaggerated femininity, the characters act as avatars.

Yacco creates worlds full of whimsical, gender-fluid characters, informed by Japanese popular and subcultures. Often delving into ideas around genderless reproduction and alternative family structures, Yacco – a prominent figure in the Japanese trans community – challenges assumptions while reflecting on contemporary ideas of identity construction in the age of social media.

Image credit: Maru Yacco, Parade (detail), 2023–24. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the National Center for Art Research, Japan. Courtesy the artist © Maru Yacco. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photograph: Christopher Snee.

Ten Thousand Sunsets ☀️ Martin Wong

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the communities of New York’s Lower East Side (known as Loisaida) and Chinatown faced the combined forces of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and gentrification. Straddling the line between observer and vo**ur, Wong, a q***r artist, spoke openly about his sense of living outside the world he documented.

A self-styled American cowboy, Wong was enthralled by life on the periphery, with prison scenes, racialized bodies, brick walls, and odes to broken hearts recurring throughout his work. Alongside carefully rendered scenes of graffiti and street culture, stylised symbols of American Sign Language (ASL) (reminiscent of covert signals used by the city’s gay community), astrological signs, constellations, as well as Chinese ideograms are repeated. The Lower East Side of Wong’s paintings, where codes of the street met codes of the cosmos, much like a dream to its dreamer, was out of his reach yet of his making. After a career spent pursuing an understanding of both America and his place in it, Wong died of an AIDS-related illness in his parents’ care in San Francisco. Cacti and succulents planted in his mother’s garden appear in one of his final series as a beautiful, resilient and alien form.

Left to right: Martin Wong, Mintaka, 1990. Courtesy Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong; Ferocactus peninsulae v. viscainensi, 1997-98. Courtesy Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong; Untitled 1990. Courtesy William Lim c/o Living Limited; Mi Vida Loca 1991. Courtesy Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong; A Near Miss 1983; Saturday Night 1992. Courtesy William Lim, Living Limited; Esmeralda: Songs for the Hearing Impaired 1982. Courtesy Alan Lau; LA2 – Malicious Mischief (collaboration with LA II) 1997. Courtesy William Lim c/o Living Limited © Estate of Martin Wong and P.P.O.W. Presentation at the 24th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from Terra Foundation for American Art and the assistance of William Lim, Living Limited. Installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, 2024, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney. Photograph: David James.