At first glance, Eora/Sydney’s art scene appears more robust than ever. Over the summer, the city hosted three blockbuster exhibitions—for Vasily Kandinsky, Louise Bourgeois, and Tacita Dean—as part of the Sydney International Art Series held across the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Snapshots of Bourgeois’s monumental spider sculpture Maman (1999) soaked in the subtropical rain circulated social media alongside images of the newly unveiled Sydney Modern complex. The celebratory Sydney Festival 2024, which, while acknowledging the sense of “distress . . . due to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas,” kicked off the new year by activating arts, music, and performance venues across the city.

Adding to the list of Eora/Sydney’s infrastructural developments is the refurbished Artspace. Coinciding with its 40th anniversary in December, Artspace’s reopening in Woolloomooloo’s Gunnery presented Jonathan Jones’s collaborative project untitled (transcriptions of country) (2021), which traced the lives of Aboriginal cultural objects and native flora and fauna expropriated by the French in the 19th century. Upstairs boasts ten renovated studios offered for annual residencies—a lifeline for artists in a city with skyrocketing rental prices.

As with Jones’s project that featured collaborative work with recent migrants and Indigenous communities, there is a healthy circuit of community-driven artist practices entering Eora/Sydney’s institutions. After showing in The National 4: Australian Art Now earlier in 2023, Hoda Afshar staged her first solo exhibition at the AGNSW in a transfixing photographic and filmic exploration of the politics of (in)visibility across territories of human and ecological vulnerability in and between Iran, Papua New Guinea, and Australia. At Powerhouse Ultimo—closed in February for a multimillion-dollar renovation over the next three years—Yuki Kihara’s project Paradise Camp (2022) presented a defiant response to Paul Gauguin in collaboration with Fa‘afafine and Fa‘atama communities, just prior to Gauguin’s major survey opening in June at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Salote Tawale, meanwhile, transformed Carriageworks into an evocative reconstruction of her memories of an ancestral home, complete with a karaoke room. The MCA Australia’s 2023 Primavera cohort of young artists, curated by Talia Smith, contended with the possibility of simultaneously existing within and protesting the structures of the museum. Accompanying this swelling tide of criticality is the launch of a partnership and jointly hosted lecture series between the University of Sydney’s Power Institute and the MCA, both founded upon the JW Power Bequest.

In March, the seasonal momentum carries through to the 24th Biennale of Sydney, “Ten Thousand Suns,” under the directorship of Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero. Suggestive of multiple coexisting genealogies, cosmologies, and posterities, the title conjures the unique possibilities offered by the biennale format in bringing together global and local interfaces while eschewing the rhetoric of catastrophe. This year, for the first time, the Biennale is partnering with the Chau Chak Wing Museum and the newly renovated, century-old White Bay Power Station.

Yet these signs of vitality are unable to mask deeper afflictions. As Eora/Sydney gazes outward to an art world divided by the resignations and cancellations unfolding amid the growing criticism of Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the city cannot remain oblivious to reverberations closer to home. Still reeling from the rightwing No campaign, which dominated in last year’s referendum to enshrine a First Nations Voice in the constitution, the socially progressive countenance of Eora/Sydney’s art scene must contend with the persistent conservatism of its settler-colonial lineage. As decolonial gestures are welcomed within institutions, one wonders how far this self-reflexivity will reach; whether the appropriation of decolonial language marks a deadening of such as praxis; and whether the affinity between marketable art and political art is weakening, if not collapsing.

It is within these conditions that the growth of artist-driven spaces in Eora/Sydney can be better understood. Despite trailing Melbourne in this regard, recent fundraising auctions to support humanitarian aid in Gaza and petitions for a ceasefire have served as a barometer for the potential of interstate as well as online coalitions to mobilize beyond mainstream institutions. This kind of responsitivity is echoed in the programming of independent galleries, such as 16albermarle project space’s fundraiser exhibitions, which channeled proceeds to Burmese artists via the Yangon-based contemporary art space Myanm/art, and the Cross Art Project’s commemoration of Indigenous Australian activism in the lead-up to the referendum. Alternative models of public programming have also begun to emerge, such as Pari’s nongkrongs (hangouts) in collaboration with Gudskul and Arab Theatre Studio; Passage Gallery’s “dumplings-with-the-artist” sessions; and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s exuberant dance parties. Even if they are overshadowed by the glamor of headline-worthy art-world events, these smaller-scaled happenings give substance and depth to the city’s infrastructural expansions. Amid the dissonance between the jubilant tones of Eora/Sydney’s infrastructural transformations and the total upheaval of the global political climate, markers of resilience and dynamism abound.

Based in Eora, Jennifer Yang is an art historian, writer, and curator, currently undertaking her doctoral program at the University of Sydney. Her writing has appeared in Memo, Artlink, and Southeast of Now, among other publications. She recently co-curated “Home 
and Away” (2023–24) with 
Luise Guest at 16albermarle project space.