Brook Andrew, 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artspace, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Cockatoo Island, Museum of Contemporary Art, National Art School (Reopened at Carriageworks), 2020, 14 March–6 September 2020

Abstract

Brook Andrew’s 22nd Biennale of Sydney came with great expectations, and for a mounting tide of reviews it delivered the edge it promised. Seizing the urgency of our time, hope, the man and the moment collide in Andrew’s 2020 vision. Though he ardently denies alpha-authority—widely promoting the project as artist and First Nations-led–don’t be fooled by methodology: with visual panache and savvy exhibition design, the ‘Look-is-Brook’, Artistic Director par excellence. Weeks out from the opening, Andrew wrote to international artists reassuring them that Sydney was ‘safe to visit’. At the time, he was referring to the summer’s ‘unprecedented’ fires, but none predicted the pandemic on the horizon or the biennale’s eight week closure. Nor would anyone imagine how ‘I can’t breathe’ would shift from bushfire smoke to corona-virus respiratory failure and then the chilling refrain of the Black Lives Matter campaign. Such cataclysmic events will forever bracket this biennale, which reads in retrospect like a predictive sign of our times. And if timing is Andrew’s forte, temporality is his medium. He treats the expanded exhibition’s form as a vehicle to slip between past, present and future, thereby folding history into the contemporary, from colonial catastrophe to the shattered now. NIRIN, meaning ‘edge’ in the Wiradjuri language of Andrew’s maternal country, spans six sites across which multi-sensory works of spatial, cultural, environmental and biological difference are cannily displayed and performed. As a connecting device, Indigenous language and relational exchange become the poetic coda, made explicit in NIRIN’s seven Wiradjuri-named themes: Dhaagun (Earth: Sovereignty and Working Together); Bagaray-Bang (Healing); YirawyDhuray (Yam-Connection: Food); Gurray (Transformation); Muriguwal Giiland (Different Stories); Ngawaal-Guyungan (Powerful-Ideas: The Power of Objects) and Bila (River: Environment). Despite NIRIN’s ‘non-hierarchical web of connections’, my custom is (still) to enter the BoS at its native home, the sandstone pile of the Art Gallery of NSW (though the BoS’s birthplace was a stone’s-throw north in the wings of the Sydney Opera House). This temple on the hill offers the low hanging fruit, beginning in the neoclassical vestibule where Wiradjuri star Karla Dickens’s Dickensian Circus