Sydney Biennale 2024: Armageddon is met with joy and subversion in epic art feast

The trauma of colonisation and war, and an impending environmental apocalypse, are themes that permeate the 2024 Biennale of Sydney. But there are also glimpses of promise and joy to be found in the free art festival, which this year draws 96 artists and collectives from 50 different countries.

Titled Ten Thousand Suns, the 24th iteration of the major exhibition spreads across six Sydney venues, including two which are stars in their own right: the recently reopened Artspace in Woolloomooloo’s historic Gunnery; and the White Bay Power Station, a cavernous building that has lay largely dormant for more than 40 years.

It has not been an easy journey for White Bay. The New South Wales government ploughed $100m into remedial works at the site, only to score an own goal with its new Rozelle interchange, over which the power station presides. Plagued with nightmarish traffic congestion that it was supposed to alleviate, not exacerbate – and the discovery of asbestos both there and at Rozelle Parklands, which has closed the closest light rail stop – visitors may feel as if they have gone through their own personal apocalypse by the time they get there.

Political hyperbole has dared to suggest the power station’s Turbine Hall will rival that of London’s Tate Modern counterpart. But while London’s Turbine Hall is all gleaming steel and lacquered floors, White Bay revels in its mid-20th century mechanical clutter and vestiges of industrial grime.

The power station is bigger though, with an eight-storey void that permits works exceptionally ambitious in scale, such as work by Orquídeas Barrileteras, Guatemala’s first female group of kite-makers; and Andrew Thomas Huang’s polymer and steel sculpture The Beast of Jade Mountain: Queen Mother of the West, which dominates the Turbine Hall in all its faux jade, car paint coloured glory. Dimly lit cul-de-sacs offer the visitor myriad little surprises, too, including the little clusters of LED light sculptures from the Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung, and the gossamer weaves of the Peruvian artist Cristina Flores Pescorán.

Cosmin Costinaș, a senior curator at Berlin’s House of World Cultures, and Inti Guerrero from Belgium’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, have curated a mammoth biennale. At the media preview on Tuesday, they told Guardian Australia that while many of the works are indeed sombre or despairing and, in some cases, born out of harrowing experiences, humour and subversion are the exhibition’s artistic foils.

“It’s not so much about victimhood or traumatic representations, but about using art to appropriate structures of oppression, such as colonialism,” Guerrero says.

There’s no better example of that subversion than Yankunytjatjara artist Kaylene Whiskey’s riotous new installation commissioned by the biennale, titled Kaylene TV. At White Bay, Whiskey has created a giant lurid walk-in television set, where her female pop culture icons frolic, including a black Wonder Woman and a few of her own hybrid black superheroes.

“The infiltration of pop culture … is appropriated by her in an iconic way,” says Costinas. “She presents to the public a world filled with her vision that inverts power relations.”

Humour and the urge to party in the face of pending Armageddon is central to this year’s biennale theme, says Guerrero. In a space adjacent to Whiskey’s installation, video works by Peter Minshall appear to celebrate rather than commemorate the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with footage of a human-propelled giant mushroom cloud made from what appears to be white tulle dancing in the streets during Trinidad’s annual carnival.

“At the forefront of this biennale is the idea that joy and celebration are not just forms of escapism; they can be forms of life affirmation and resilience,” says Guerrero.

Depictions of nuclear warfare – and the cost of war to human life and the environment – make their appearances across five of the venues too.

The recently reopened Artspace has expanded its gallery spaces over three floors, with 10 artist studios and much of its 1900 original brickwork, timber trusses and columns restored.

There you’ll find the Ukrainian artist Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s response to the Russian invasion of her homeland, through eight oils on canvas at once beautiful and shocking, disembodied heads hovering amid pastel swirls of anguish and despair.

At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, False Flag (2021-23) – an installation by the Netherlands-based artists Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum – focuses on the devastating bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish civil war.

Fibreglass models of futuristic aircraft, inspired by Rene Magritte’s 1937 painting Le Drapeau noir (The Black Flag), are suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, some more grimly realistic than fantastical when viewed from this new age of drone warfare. On a back wall, monochrome footage of the Basque mountains plays, and voices can be heard calling out across the terrain. They are naming the figures depicted in Pablo Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece Guernica.

At the same venue, childhood trauma permeates the work of the Indonesian artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, better known as Murni, who died in 2006 at the age of 39.

A survivor of child sexual abuse, and a domestic worker from the age of 10, the self-taught artist appropriated the flat plains and bold figuration of traditional Balinese painting to explicitly express her sexual experiences, and the societal and gender constraints she unflinchingly challenged during her life cut short.

Sharing the same space with Murni are four larger-than-life figures created by the New Zealand-based collective Pacific Sisters. A multidisciplinary arts practice at the intersection of Māori Pacific and queer identity, the collective practices what it dubs “fashion activism”, where clothing is less an adornment and more a statement of power.

But behind the outrageously flamboyant displays, the nuclear scourge looms. MuruMoa – a work in which pigs’ teeth, horse bone and volcanic rock are sewn into silk, satin and shell – is named after one of the sites of the French nuclear tests conducted in the Pacific from 1966 to 1996, and stands guard over what remains.

In an adjacent space the Australian artist Bonita Ely offers a macabre family tableau in her installation C20th Mythological Beasts; At Home with the Locust People. The work, created in 1975, portrays humans as both victim and perpetrator, a nuclear family constructed in grotesque fashion reclining on a sofa watching a decidedly nuclear end to the world on the telly.

Ely’s second work in the biennale – at the University of NSW Art and Design campus in Paddington – is more personal but equally compelling. In Interior Decoration 2013, the artist has created a miniature battlefield from the repurposed early 20th century furniture of her parents’ bedroom.

A survivor of domestic violence as a child, Ely constructs a trench and watchtower from art deco era bedheads, dressers and chiffoniers. Her mother’s Singer sewing machine is reimagined as a machine gun. The clattering of the machine would prompt unprovoked rage from Ely’s father, a PTSD-affected second world war machine gunner..

At the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, the first work visitors will encounter is Elizabeth Dobbie’s photograph of First Nations dancer Malcolm Cole dressed up as Captain Cook for the 1988 Mardi Gras – another work whose business is, as Costinas puts it, “inverting and subverting power structures to challenge colonialism.”

On the ceiling above, the Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita’s vivid paintings on canvas resemble long luxuriant carpet runners, reinterpreting Bali’s traditional Kamasan paintings, usually done by men of men, to celebrate women’s spiritual and sexual empowerment instead.

For gallery goers who just can’t get enough of that apocalypse now feeling, Tracey Moffatt’s 2007 video collage Doomed is screening as part of the biennale’s offerings at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Her compilation of disaster scenes, taken from just about every movie over the past century venturing to depict the end of the world, produces a mesmerising and at times comical effect.

Reposing serenely on the opposite wall from Doomed is a work by Robert Campbell Jnr, painted five years before his premature death in 1993. In Aboriginal Camp at Sunset, the Ngaku artist of the Dunghutti nation reimagines the last dusk his people witnessed before they encountered their own doom: the invasion of 1788.

With six venues to cover, the MCA’s exhibition is perhaps best to visit last, not because its hang is any less riveting but because it ends in a more uplifting way.

Anne Samat’s joyful Cannot Be Broken and Won’t Live Unspoken #2 commands an entire wall of the gallery, transforming rattan sticks, kitchen and garden utensils, children’s plastic toys, brightly coloured beads, ceramic and metal ornaments and hand-woven tapestry into an expansive totem honouring family lineage and mythology.

The place of love from which this Malaysian artist draws her inspiration is perhaps most eloquently explained in the wall text: “Her sculptures are modelled from the artist’s relationships with friends and family and form sites of personal devotion and care. Approaching each figure is designed to feel like receiving a warm hug.”

• The 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, is open until 10 June at the White Bay Power Station, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, the University of NSW Art and Design galleries at Paddington and Artspace in Woolloomooloo