This year’s media preview of NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (BoS) was a juggernaut experience. The press tour kicked off at 8:30 a.m. at the National Art School (NAS) and continued all day, with visits to Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC), the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW), Artspace, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCAA), and finally Cockatoo Island, which I ruefully regret bailing out on. (It had been a long and interesting day.) Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 lockdown, I only got to experience Cockatoo Island virtually. And of course, viewing any artworks via a digital platform is a very different experience from viewing them firsthand. Equally obviously, virtual viewing was not my first choice.
This is all rather poignant, as in the last review I did for this journal, of the 2018 Biennale of Sydney, I had expressed the hope that an Australian Indigenous curator would direct the...
