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. 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.
