Sydney’s Biennale theme, ‘rememory’, urges us to confront trauma – now more relevant than ever
- Written by Rodney Taveira, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, University of Sydney
The Biennale of Sydney is returning this year for its 25th edition, and exploring a bold new theme: rememory.
It’s a term artistic director Hoor Al Qasimi adopted from Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987). In her curatorial text, Al Qasimi says:
Abandoning typical and linear storytelling, in which history and memories are presented through objectification, rememory is how we become subjects and storytellers of our collective present through events of the past.
It’s a concept that asks us to rethink not only how we remember the past, but how our engagement with memories in the present – especially memories transformed into artwork – can shape the future for ourselves and those around us.
Morrison’s concept of rememory
Morrison’s Beloved is set primarily in 1873, after the American Civil War. The novel follows Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman haunted by her past.
Her story is inspired by Margaret Garner, a real-life fugitive slave who killed her baby daughter and attempted to kill her three other children to prevent their recapture into slavery. Sethe, too, is forced down this path in Beloved.
Throughout the novel, rememory is an involuntary, disorienting and deeply personal form of remembering – wherein characters relive forgotten or repressed traumatic histories. These “ghosts” of the past materialise as Beloved, a mysterious young woman who embodies the main character’s dead daughter and the trauma she bears.
Beloved vividly intrudes from the past into the present, tormenting and destabilising each character – yet remains unreachable.
For Morrison, the true horrors of slavery are in many ways “unspeakable”. They cannot be adequately “counted” in official facts and figures, which often make “the institution and not the people” the centre of history.
Morrison viewed rememory as a way of “putting the authority back into the hands of the slaves, rather than the slaveholder”.
Throughout the novel, this is created by immersing the reader in each character’s interior world. We feel Sethe fight against remembering her past – the repetition of the visceral “No. No. Nono. Nonono” as she desperately tries to resist a memory breaking through.
Like the characters, the reader is haunted by Beloved’s ambiguous, lingering presence. We, too, are trying to piece together these fragments of repressed memories that emerge in fits and starts rather than a clear chronology.
Morrison throws us into a world where nobody “can bear too long to dwell on the past” and yet “nobody can avoid it”.
We cannot look away. The reader is compelled to inhabit the pain and suffering of the characters, who in turn, reclaim authority over their own past.
Rememory is a personal reckoning and a blueprint for confronting traumatic histories that can’t be neatly contained or forgotten.
Who is Hoor Al Qasimi?
In 2024, Hoor Al Qasimi was named ArtReview’s most influential person in the contemporary art world. She is a Sheikah (Emirati princess) from the United Arab Emirates, with her father serving as the emir of Sharjah. At just 22-years-old, she assumed responsibility for the 2003 Sharjah Biennial.
Al Qasimi has earned international credibility by championing non-Western and Indigenous artists, weaving political themes into large-scale exhibitions.
Her guiding philosophy appears straightforward: decentralise art and make it accessible for all, not just those in elite spaces.
We see this philosophy realised in the Sydney Biennale’s first appearance in the suburb of Penrith and its return to Campbelltown — both highly multicultural areas. As Al Qasimi explained in an interview:
People say, ‘oh, it’s too far’ and I think, far for whom?
Biennale donors and board members have debated Al Qasimi’s appointment due to her views on the war on Gaza. She has condemned the systemic destruction of Palestinians and Gaza, and voiced the sentiment that “none of us will be free until Palestine is free”.
Peter Wertheim, the co-chief executive of Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said her appointment was an “example of one of Australia’s flagship cultural institutions being captured by an extremist anti-western political agenda”.
Rememory and ethical spectatorship
Art encourages contemplating the other, breaking down their otherness and preventing the simplistic, violent divide of “us” versus “them”. Being “pro” something doesn’t automatically make us “anti” to another, seemingly opposed idea.
With this in mind, there’s another way to view Sethe’s unspeakable act in Beloved. Her decision to kill her daughter is, at face value, abominable. Yet it approaches our understanding against the backdrop of the larger unspeakable suffering of the world she was born into.
Rememory calls on all of us to engage more thoughtfully with what we encounter. In the context of art, this means not just passively viewing a work, but actively engaging with it. It also means accepting the responsibility that other people’s experiences ask of you – without rushing to simple resolutions.
Whether you are viewing Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall’s sculptural works at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, or Dread Scott’s portraits of the incarcerated at Campbelltown Arts Centre, you can ask: whose memory is being held in the piece before me? And do I share that memory, or encounter it from a different angle?
Both positions are real and valid, and each carries different obligations. If the memory is yours, the work may ask you to see yourself in it. If it’s not yours, you may be asked not to turn away.
Even the controversy surrounding Al Qasimi’s appointment is a form of rememory, as it surfaces tensions about who can speak, grieve, resist publicly – and whose suffering matters.
Moreover, Khaled Sabsabi’s reinstatement at this year’s Venice Biennale – wherein he will become the first Australian artist to exhibit in both the main exhibition and Australia Pavilion – suggests artists who confront our complex politics should be valued as much as they are challenged.
The Biennale isn’t about resolving such tensions, but holding them open.
Authors: Rodney Taveira, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, University of Sydney
