Biennale of Sydney

There is a word in Toni Morrison's Beloved that does not behave like other words. Rememory — not memory, not recall, but a thing that lives in places, in objects, in the air of a room, and that returns to anyone who walks into its weather. "Some things go," Morrison's narrator tells her daughter. "Some things just stay." It is from this word, and the cosmology it carries, that Hoor Al Qasimi has taken the title of the 25th Biennale of Sydney, which opened on 14 March 2026 across multiple principal sites in greater Sydney and runs free of charge until 14 June.

The choice is not a flourish. Al Qasimi has been working with versions of the same problem — what art can do with the parts of history that refuse to be archived, repressed, or contained — for two decades, first as the director of the Sharjah Biennial she remade from a regional event into one of the field's most consequential platforms, and lately as the president of the International Biennial Association. Her arrival in Sydney is, in fact, her second arrival. She was first appointed to lead the 24th edition in 2024 before stepping aside in 2023, citing the impossibility of producing the exhibition she had imagined within the time and political weather that then existed. That edition, Ten Thousand Suns, was delivered instead by Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero, who built a quieter, more sun-soaked exhibition around joy and resistance. Al Qasimi has now had three additional years to think.

The First Nations spine

The defining structural decision of Rememory is the appointment of Bruce Johnson McLean as First Nations Curatorial Fellow — a role that is not, this time, an addendum but a curatorial spine. McLean, a Wierdi man of the Birri Gubba Nation and a senior curator of Indigenous Australian art at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, has worked closely with Al Qasimi on the artist selection, the first wave of which — thirty-seven artists — was announced ahead of the opening, with the full list released across the months leading into March. The 2020 edition NIRIN, curated by Wiradjuri artist Brook Andrew, established the principle that a First Nations curatorial voice could lead the Biennale outright. The 25th is the first edition since to extend the work — not by repeating Andrew's gesture, which was singular and ought to remain so, but by building a second model: a co-authored exhibition in which Indigenous curatorial intelligence is woven into every decision rather than asked to occupy a designated chapter.

The result is most legible in the partnership with the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, which has come on as the edition's Visionary Partner with a programme of commissions concentrated on First Nations artists from across the global Indigenous field. The principle is one Cartier has staged before — its long-standing relationships with artists working from Indigenous and First Nations contexts have, over decades, produced some of the most carefully made monographic exhibitions in the foundation's history — but the scale and curatorial framing here, with McLean and Al Qasimi as the editorial pair, are particular to Sydney. These are artists whose work has, for years, been doing exactly the kind of historiographic excavation that Morrison's rememory proposes: not the exhibition of culture but the reckoning with what has been lost, what has been buried, and what refuses to remain buried.

The shape of the city

The exhibition has been deliberately decentred. The Art Gallery of New South Wales — newly expanded by the Naala Badu building, the SANAA-designed addition that opened in late 2022 — anchors the institutional end of the project. The White Bay Power Station, the heritage-listed former coal plant that has spent two decades waiting for a second life, hosts the largest cluster of new commissions. The Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney provides the academic and archaeological frame; the Campbelltown Arts Centre, more than fifty kilometres south-west of the CBD, anchors the exhibition in the Dharawal Country of Sydney's outer south-west. There are further commissioned works installed across the Inner West and Western Sydney.

The geometry is consequential. Sydney's biennials have historically rested on the gravitational pull of the harbour — Cockatoo Island as totem, the Museum of Contemporary Art on Circular Quay as anchor, the Art Gallery in the Domain a short ferry ride away. The 25th edition pulls visitors west and south, away from the postcard. This is, on the evidence, the McLean-Al Qasimi reading of rememory at the level of map: a city whose colonial history is densest where its tourist eye is thinnest.

What Al Qasimi has done is the slower, quieter work of building a structure in which First Nations curatorship is not the subject of the exhibition but the grammar of it. — On the 25th edition

What the title is not

It is worth saying what Rememory is not. It is not a memorial exhibition. There is no thematic ribbon — no curatorial wall text promising, in the deadened idiom of the contemporary biennial, an "interrogation" of "histories." Al Qasimi has, in her published statements for the edition, written sparingly and in Morrison's register rather than the curator's, turning frequently to the artists themselves. Where curators of recent Sydney editions have used the catalogue as a venue for an extended thesis, Al Qasimi appears to have chosen restraint — letting the title, and the writers and artists gathered around it, do the work that an introductory essay would otherwise be asked to do.

That refusal is the more interesting move. The Biennale of Sydney has, for fifty years, carried a complicated patrimony: founded in 1973 by the Italian-Australian engineer and patron Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, expanded through the long stewardship of his son Luca, fractured publicly in 2014 when artists withdrew over the family company Transfield's contract to run Australia's offshore immigration detention centres, and gradually reconstituted around a curatorial politics that the founding family could no longer credibly claim. Al Qasimi has not, in interviews, used the language of repair. She has used the language of a different inheritance — Morrison's, and the wider tradition of Black, Indigenous and diasporic thought to which Morrison belongs. The Biennale of Sydney, in 2026, has inherited the museum-going public of one of the world's wealthiest cities and is asking it to read.

The criticism, early

The Australian art press has reliably treated each new Biennale of Sydney as a referendum on the institution itself — on its scale, its sources of money, its relationship to the city, its public — at least as much as on the work in the rooms. The 25th edition arrives with more than the usual freight: it is the first since the curatorial fellowship with First Nations colleagues was made the structuring principle rather than a strand, the first under a non-Australian artistic director appointed from outside the Anglophone biennial circuit, and the first to test, at scale, whether White Bay Power Station can carry the kind of programme an editorial of this kind requires. Early notices, accordingly, are doing the double work that Sydney reviews always do.

There are objections worth naming, even as the full programme is still being announced. The geography of a Sydney biennial — spread across the harbour and out to Campbelltown — is, for visitors with limited time, punitive; the question of how the exhibition coheres for a single visitor across multiple days is the question every Sydney edition has to answer. The Fondation Cartier partnership is generous and substantive, but it does also raise the question of why a Paris-based foundation has been the institution best placed to commission new First Nations work at this scale. And the edition's defenders will eventually need to confront the line that runs from the Transfield boycott of 2014 to the institutional dependence on private partnership now baked into the Biennale's operating model. None of this is unique to Sydney. All of it is more visible here than elsewhere.

What Al Qasimi has done, against this, is the slower and quieter work of building a structure in which First Nations curatorship is not the subject of the exhibition but the grammar of it — and of inviting an institution to live for a season inside a borrowed word. Whether it stays, or whether some things just go, is what the next three years of programming will decide.