22nd Biennale of Sydney: “NIRIN”

A boy stands on a mountain, blowing a tiny plastic bugle, clothes whipping in the wind. A dirge-like sound grows louder and louder, drowning out the boy’s jaunty music. The noise reaches a pitch so high that it becomes unbearable, an aural presence that blankets the landscape, cancels out its beauty, replacing it, instead, with an atmosphere of doom.

(2019), a five-channel video work by Aziz Hazara, played on screens suspended in mid-air at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) as part of “NIRIN,” the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, curated by Brook Andrew, the first Indigenous artistic director in the exhibition’s 46-year history. Hazara’s work takes its name from a bow-shaped meteorological system that appears out of nowhere, sparking winds that rip through places with the references the suicide bombs that ricochet through Hazara’s native Kabul, the way in which the unspeakable creeps over the ordinary. But it also articulates how different kinds of climate—natural, political, cultural—can coalesce into the perfect storm.