Cutting edge at core of biennale

Brook Andrew brings a fresh perspective on global stories as artistic director of the Biennale of Sydney.

Brook Andrew is artistic director of the 2020 Biennale of Sydney. Picture:John Feder

For a small country, Haiti conjures some powerful ­impressions — from terrible poverty, earthquakes and disease, to voodoo spirituality and strongman politics. It was the site of first contact in the New World — ­Columbus landed at what he called La Navidad in 1492 — and also of the Haitian Revolution when, in 1792, slaves rose up and won freedom for themselves and others elsewhere in the French colonies.

It is partly because of these chapters of history that Brook ­Andrew, artistic director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, made Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, his first port of call when he was researching artists to include in his exhibition. He was appalled at the wealth disparity and the impoverishment of the vast majority of the population. When he arrived there was civil unrest over ­rising fuel prices. But he was also inspired by the resilience of the Haitian people and the vitality of their culture — qualities that he wanted to include in his edition of the Biennale which he has named Nirin, a Wiradjuri word meaning “edge”.

“I wanted to go there first, because it is a site of continuous ­resistance,” he says of his visit to Haiti. “The power of the history there, kind of spoke to everything that I think Nirin is about … The deep respect, and the formidable self-respect that people there have. They fought for their freedom. There are very few countries in the world where people released themselves from intense pain. That legacy is unfathomable. I just thought I owed it to them to go to that place.”

If Haiti is not on every traveller’s dream itinerary, Andrew is ­instead bringing a sample of the nation’s art and culture to Sydney. Voodoo religious imagery and artworks involving human remains are part of Haitian arts practice — no human remains are part of the Biennale exhibition, Andrew assures us — but guest artist Andre Eugene will be tapping some of these powerful traditions in his work. His installation at the Art Gallery of NSW will involve old car and motorbike chassis fashioned into a kind of coffin or altar. Another guest is New York-based Haitian anthropologist and performance artist Gina Athena Ulysse, whose work has involved turning the tables on old-school hierarchies of anthropology in which non-white people were the examined “other”.

Andrew, who has Wiradjuri (central west NSW) and Scottish heritage, says that one purpose of his biennale program is to invite people to “put on a different lens” when experiencing the work of indigenous people from Australia and around the world.

“There have always been stereotypes around not only First ­Nations people, but people who are seen as being on the edge,” he says. “I think that by taking control of your own stories, your own narratives, you can use disciplines such as anthropology like Gina does to say, ‘No, this is actually how it is.’

“There is a gentleness in that, and also a fierceness. If you are a believer in energy, no matter how you interpret it, it’s quite wholesome, and puts some authenticity into the kind of damage that ­traditional anthropology has done.”

Andrew has looked far and wide in his search for artists to include in the Biennale, an 87-day exhibition at six main venues and other sites across the metropolis, from the Art Gallery of NSW, to Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour, to Campbelltown Arts Centre in the city’s southwest.

His first criterion was what he has just alluded to: that stop-you-in-your-tracks energy or urgency he detects in an artist’s work. Many of the artists he has selected are working with themes that include indigeneity, gender, colonialism and sexuality. In a statement of intent, he says artists have the power to “resolve, heal, dismember and imagine futures of transformation for resetting the world. Sovereignty is at the centre of these actions.” Many of the 100 or so participating artists are new to the Biennale of Sydney, and those from Nepal, Georgia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Ecuador will be representing their nations for the first time.

Andrew has approached the task of curatorship not in a top-down fashion but from the grassroots. He has been widely consultative in what he describes as a First Nations, artist-led exhibition that aims to upturn received narratives and inherited practices.

By way of example, he describes one of the group installations he has planned for the ground floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay. It comprises a suite of what he calls “powerful objects” that summon stories of First Nations and settler cultures.

It includes footage from 1949 when anthropologist HR Balfour filmed the removal of sacred trees with ceremonial markings (dendroglyphs) from the Kalimangl Bora Ground in northern NSW. The carved zigzag patterns are significant to the local people and to Andrew, who deploys the distinctive patterns in his own art. (In Andrew’s consultative manner, the screening of this sensitive footage is with permission of the local people, and of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ­Studies.)

The footage is accompanied by a 3D print — significantly, not the actual article — of a dendroglyph log that is held in the Pitt Rivers anthropology museum at Oxford where Andrew is a ­research fellow. To this documentary evidence of stolen culture he has added a poignant depiction of loss as experienced in the settler community: Frederick McCubbin’s painting Bush Burial. Other “powerful objects” by artists including Denison Benowah (Brazil), Victoria Santa Cruz (Peru) and Eric Bridgeman (Queensland and Papua New Guinea) will add to the matrix of mystery and ­meaning.

“It’s a web of connections that support each other,” Andrew explains. “They are documents, or objects that I think have power and can lend to stories, that connect not only the artworks but can regenerate histories or narratives. It’s about truth-telling and the way in which people can maybe look at histories in certain ways that connect to other artworks.”

Nirin, in Andrew’s conception of the Biennale, means putting artists at the centre and pushing towards the periphery. To use an art-world cliche, a close approximation of the term is “cutting edge”. In many cases, the artists he has chosen are representatives of indigenous peoples. Others are marginalised because of sexuality or gender. A trio of gay artists, exiled from theocratic Iran — Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian — have made an installation from objects in the collection of the Powerhouse Museum, including a Victorian mourning brooch, an Egyptian amulet and the Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt. South Africa’s Zanele Muholi, well known for their visually arresting photographic portraits, identifies as non-binary and uses the ­pronouns they/their/them. Their contribution to the Biennale will explore the politics of race, gender and sexuality in photographs where the subject controls the image.

The visual arts exhibition is accompanied by a series of education events and talks that Andrew says is embedded in the artistic program. The 250th anniversary of James Cook’s landing will not pass unnoticed. Andrew will join a debate at the Town Hall on April 29 — the date of the Endeavour’s arrival at Botany Bay — on whether to “cook Cook or not”. Another artist, Nicholas Galanin — whose Tlingit and Unangan ancestors in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands were visited by Cook on his fatal third voyage — is making an installation at Cockatoo Island that is a “shadow” of the Cook statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park.

“Nirin is really a proposition, an experiment — but a serious one,” says Andrew, who turns 50 during the Biennale season. “I ­respect the artists, and want them to feel they have ownership. It’s their gig, it’s their space, a safe space … As an audience, it’s an ­opportunity to have a window on to that, and an opportunity to ­respect those people and where they’re from.”

The 22nd Biennale of Sydney is at various venues, March 14 to June 8.