The National 2021: New Australian Art interrogated a nation disentangling and re-forming its disparate threads of identity. The third in a series of biennials surveying contemporary art across Australia, this iteration underscored the country’s fractured present and offered proposals for a renewed future. Spanning three cultural institutions on Gadigal Country in Sydney—the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA)—works by 39 emerging and established artists and collectives were represented at exhibitions curated by Matt Cox and Erin Vink (AGNSW), Abigail Moncrieff(Carriageworks), and Rachel Kent (MCA).
The National 2021 hummed with voices calling to decenter and diversify. In a move toward linguistic decolonization, wall labels foregrounded the Indigenous names of artists’ places
