Stories open to interpretation: the 2026 Biennale of Sydney embraces narratives with multiple meanings
- Written by The Conversation
Storytelling is at the heart of Rememory, the 25th Biennale of Sydney. And we humans like nothing better than being told a tale.
As literary critic Frank Kermode so persuasively argued, stuck as we are in the middle of our own stories, narratives with clear beginnings and endings help us make sense of an unpredictable world.
A key strength of art is its capacity to craft narratives with multiple meanings: ambivalent, ambiguous tales without end, open to interpretations.
By selecting Rememory as her theme – a phrase lifted from the brilliant author Toni Morrison – curator Hoor Al Qasimi highlights the fact that artistic narratives, like memories, are both personal and collective, enduring yet subject to change over time.
Read more: Sydney’s Biennale theme, ‘rememory’, urges us to confront trauma – now more relevant than ever
Displacement, and hope
Many of the narratives in Rememory are tales of migration, exile and the dispossession First Nations people experience without leaving home.
All the artists have something to say. Some artists choose to tell their tales with words spoken aloud or written down, but the stories that spoke loudest to me were utterly silent and text-less.
Marian Abboud describes herself as Lebanese, first generation Australian. Her installation at White Bay Power Station, Sister +++++ Familial Formations III, is a series of huge photographs suspended above an old battered sedan which is piled high with equally obsolete TVs.
Connected by tangled coils of electrical cords and roughly strapped together, this car/tech combo seems deliberately unstable. In several photos Abboud cradles a battered metal basin filled with dark liquid. Is it wine? Maybe it is blood or oil?
In other images she wears a black veil in front of a suburban garage. She appears to be just slightly hovering above the asphalt driveway, an apt metaphor for the diasporic experience.
As a migrant myself, I know firsthand this story of perpetual displacement – the sensation of not quite belonging in either the cultural homeland or the adopted country.
Fernando Poyón is a Maya Kaqchikel artist from Guatemala. His sculpture at Penrith Regional Gallery consists of five life-sized stalks of corn crafted from bright green pencils.
They appear to levitate over a bright circle of fake marigolds strewn across real dirt. It feels like we are witnessing a ritual suspended mid invocation, perhaps one celebrating the entwinement of nature and culture.
Poyón’s title, Bringing joy to the earth, is filled with hope. Yet this artwork also seems to issue a warning. Pencils may symbolise a certain kind of knowledge transfer, but they are also the skeletal remains of dead trees. Poyón reminds us we destroy the natural world at our own peril.
We are part of nature, not separate or superior. As the climate-crisis continues to accelerate, this is a story that needs to be heard again and again until those with the power to make change finally listen.
The labour of artwork
Ema Shin, a migrant to Australia from Japan, presents a gigantic woven and bejewelled heart at the Chau Chak Wing Museum.
In this sculpture she makes the most of what I call the linguistics of labour-intensity: that ability of protracted hard work to add an extra layer of meaning to some artworks.
Ema Shin Hearts of Absent Women (Tree of Family) 2026 wool, cotton, bamboo yarn, acrylic yarn, cotton pearls, glass beads, satin ribbon, aluminium. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and BEEAH Group with generous support from National Center for Art Research, Japan and assistance from Tapestry Foundation Australia and Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW). Woven by Ema Shin and ATW weaver Saffron Gordon.
Courtesy of the artist and Gallerysmith, Melbourne Photograph: David James
Titled Hearts of Absent Women (Tree of Family), this richly ornamented organ can be read as a monument honouring matriarchal power. But this heart is not beating. And the textile techniques on display here aren’t the only traditional women’s work evoked by the labour-intensity of Shin’s magnificent creation.
It brings to mind the fact that not only do women still take on more than their fair share of domestic chores, but often they shoulder the bulk of emotional labour in families.
Shin’s huge heart is sumptuous and beguiling. But thinking about all this hard feminine work, the creamy accretions of bulbous fake pearls spilling from its oversized arteries start to resemble life-threatening cholesterol build-up, hinting at the toxic effects of systemic misogyny.
For me, Ngurrara Canvas II at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is the real heart of Rememory. The Ngurrara artists were 43 men and women whose Country includes the Great Sandy Desert, and this vividly coloured 80-square-metre canvas seems to vibrate with deep knowledge.
Installation view of the 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 14 March – 14 June 2026.
Artwork © the artists, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Felicity Jenkins
The work is designed to tell a story of continuous connection to Country spanning millennia. They presented this painting as evidence in a 1997 Native Title tribunal and the tale it tells is one of resistance, persistence and ingenuity. It also contains an incontrovertible truth: this always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
The 25th Biennale of Sydney is full of stories. What I truly love about art is that the tales I’m told are unique. They are a collective narrative hybrid, a mash-up triggered by the artists’ visual poetry and all the associations reverberating around inside my mind.
Each visitor to Rememory will create their own stories.
The 25th Biennale of Sydney: Rememory is on until June 14.
