Biennale titles can sometimes seem like huge abstract umbrellas, designed to be unfurled over the broadest possible selection of artworks. The artistic directors of the 24^th Biennale of Sydney, Cosmin Costinaş and Inti Guerrero, have taken a more courageous approach with their theme Ten Thousand Suns, inviting the audience to follow them on some deep dives through history to find new ways to consider the present and imagine a hopeful future.

Sydney is one of the world’s longest-running Biennales and was the first established in the Asia-Pacific region. This edition features 96 artists and collectives from 50 countries and territories and takes place across the city’s major museums and kunsthalle, two university galleries and a post-industrial venue having its debut. Taking celebration as its methodology, Ten Thousand Suns investigates how forms of collective resistance by marginalised communities can transform dire straits and create legacies of light. This is foregrounded at the newly unveiled flagship venue White Bay Power Station, through numerous artworks honouring events such as Carnival, Mardi Gras, and FESTAC ‘77 (the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria).

White Bay Power Station is a century-old heritage-listed site which has been extensively remediated and inaugurated for this edition of the Biennale. Just as the world heritage-listed ex-penal colony and shipyard Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour has, in past years, been a major attraction for visitors to the Biennale of Sydney, the opportunity to get inside the enigmatic, soaring structures of White Bay, which has sat shuttered for 40 years, presents a near-irresistible temptation to Sydneysiders.

While some works, such as the magnificent kites of Orquídeas Barrileteras suspended over the central atrium-like suns, or Andrew Thomas Huang’s huge commanding mask The Beast of Jade Mountain: Queen Mother of the West (西王母) watching over the turbine hall boldly hold their own among the post-industrial surroundings, others such as the techno-mushroom chandeliers of Trevor Yeung (Hong Kong’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale) have a more nuanced aesthetic conversation with the space, communing with the metal beams that crisscross the Station’s vast expanses. Fibre and textile works, such as that of Diné weaver and fibre artist Eric-Paul Riege and Peruvian artist Cristina Flores Pescorán, provide a softening contrast.

There is a strong focus on materiality throughout the Biennale, with artists emphasising the individual qualities of their chosen materials and celebrating and reprising craft techniques and traditional cultural forms. Textiles and fibre art, found objects, sculptures, ceramics, instruments, video art, performance art, painting, photography—there is a balance of mediums across each venue with a tendency toward the handmade and the materially abundant. Warm, richly coloured gallery walls unite the exhibition across its various museum venues, literally highlighting the Biennale’s celebratory tone.

The investigative threads in Ten Thousand Suns are both thematic and artist-focused. Costinaş and Guerrero have delved into significant, yet sometimes forgotten elements of Australian and global histories and contextualised them within the exhibition more broadly. For example, the impacts of nuclear testing in the Pacific are explored in several venues, notably at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where elaborate contemporary costume works by fashion activist collective, the Pacific Sisters, are presented alongside earlier paintings and installation works such as Weaver Hawkins' 1947 painting Atomic Power, and underscored by historical images including that of the notorious mushroom cloud anniversary cake, originally depicted in Life Magazine in 1946. With this reminder of the intensive impacts of the atomic age, under a title like Ten Thousand Suns, this Biennale doesn’t shy away from the climate emergency. Still, the multiplicity invoked in the name leaves space for a range of cultures and voices to reframe the current mainstream narratives of crisis and looming apocalypse. For example, the intricately woven wearable objects made by Aotearoa New Zealand group Te Whā a Huna, on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), arise from a complex, finely tuned relationship between land, seasons and ancestry, while the textile sculpture of Flores Pescoránhas imagines a cure for a health condition arising from a conversation between past and present bodies, grounded in nature’s healing powers.

It’s refreshing in a Biennale to encounter numerous bodies of work by the same artists across multiple venues, a feature of Ten Thousand Suns. It shows genuine curatorial care to allow the audience the opportunity to encounter the work of unfamiliar artists across different physical contexts—providing a fuller picture of that artist’s practice than a single work or suite might. It also adds to the experience of the Biennale as an unfolding journey, conversation, or celebration, where ideas and images are revisited, recirculated and revalued.

Several Australian artists are given this treatment, including photographer William Yang and painter Juan Davila. Australian First Nations artist Doreen Chapman, a Manyjilyjarra woman, has a work from her series of paintings of stylised Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) stationed at the entrance of every venue of the Biennale. The paintings give a wry take on the Acknowledgement of Indigenous Country that occurs as a matter of protocol at the commencement of most Australian cultural venues and events and invite pause for thought about the debt Australia owes to its First Peoples.

An international art biennale presents the opportunity to have our art considered through a different lens and reflected at us. Ten Thousand Suns embraces the possibilities of its form—bringing a fresh international perspective to overfamiliar or overlooked local art histories. The 24th Biennale of Sydney celebrates human ingenuity, curiosity, resilience and drive. It reminds us that when all might seem hopeless, by giving space to artists we can imagine an alternative collective future.

The 24th Biennale of Sydney, ‘Ten Thousand Suns’, will be on display until June 10, 2024, 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.