Cultivating Community
Eucalyptus and lemon myrtle burned. Brendan Kerin, a representative of Redfern’s Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, expertly fed leaves and branches into a steel bucket. As each handful of specially gathered material was consumed by fire, the smoke increased until it was billowing and voluminous. Continuous swells of fragrant smoke grew and grew until they swallowed up the gathered crowd, filling our lungs and permeating our clothes. This smoking ceremony, Kerin explained, was like ‘a shower for your insides’, the idea was that it would cleanse the visitors and their surroundings of ‘bad history’. Indeed, our location, Sydney Harbour’s Cockatoo Island, set up as a convict penal colony in 1839, is a site where mass transportation and forced labour is visibly evident in architectural and industrial remains. Yet in the late summer of 2020 visitors gathered on the island to witness Kerin’s ceremony as part of the welcome to country to officially open NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney.
The word ‘nirin’ means ‘edge’ in Wiradjuri, the mother tongue of artistic director Brook Andrews, a prolific artist, curator and Oxford PhD candidate.
Bringing indigenous language to the fore, signifies a turning point in Australia, one described by Andrews as a ‘precipice of change’ involving ‘people renegotiating and confronting histories which shift dimensionally’. Indeed his appointment as leader of Australia’s paramount artistic event seems to signal such a change, one that is timely in the face of white Australia’s celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s arrival. In this artist-led biennale, indigenous peoples and artists Cockatoo Island is one of the six main venues for this year’s biennale. Andrews explains that in the Dharug language it is known as Wareamah. ‘War’ means women and ‘eamah’ means land, suggesting that the island may have been a site for women’s ceremonies. The major theme for this section is therefore ‘bagaray-bang’, or healing. Lisa Reihana’s contribution is situated amongst a range of artworks that take a restorative approach to the specific history of the site, as well as broader phenomena such as the degradation of the world’s oceans and histories of colonisation. Nearby Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama cloaked the enormous Turbine Hall with (2012–20), a patchwork of used jute sacks that forms a mass reminder of histories of labour and incarceration. Jose Dávila from Mexico deftly arranged materials found on the island into precarious, formalist sculptures while the collective Artree Nepal showed (2020), a collection of traditional Nepalese medicinal herbs.
