Ten Thousand Suns

View the full list of participating artists here.

The Biennale of Sydney hosts several improvisations for its 24th edition, Ten Thousand Suns—like rāgas and their musical colours that reflect the sun as it moves throughout the day. Across these resonances, from dawn to dusk, a collective future might appear. One that is not only possible but necessary to be lived in irrepressible and defiant joy. In plenitude and in common humanity.

Among these polyphonies of improvisations, the Biennale takes as one of its anchors an exuberant moment of performance and emancipation. It follows the swirling spirit of the NAISDA, the inaugural troupe of First Nations contemporary dancers known fully as the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association. This groundbreaking group was founded in 1976 under the leadership of African American dancer and cultural manager Carole Y. Johnson. Together with its student ensemble the AIDT (Aboriginal/Islander Dance Theatre), NAISDA was at the time both a platform for the cultural revival of Indigenous dance cultures and a laboratory for radical and visionary experimentation. Their repertoire bravely touched on subjects such as the Stolen Generation of First Nations children torn from their families by government authorities from the mid-1800s to 1970s, or the need to contemporaneously memorialize the landmark protest of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy established in 1972 and continuing to this day.

The AIDT also actively participated in arts festivals in the newly decolonised world, finding solidarity across the Pacific and on the African continent. In the latter, they took part in the legendary FESTAC’77, joining more than 16,000 Black artists, performers, poets, and intellectuals who descended upon Lagos in a celebration of international Black unity. There, the AIDT performed alongside the likes of Gilberto Gill, Stevie Wonder, Audre Lorde, Les Ballets Africains, and Miriam Makeba, as well as a contingent from the newly independent Papua New Guinea. The presence of Aboriginal artists at FESTAC ’77 marks a particular globality in art history, one that bypasses the dogmatic Euro-American cultural axis of the time.

This history and radiant nexus of resistance, resilience and rhythm, was immortalised by legendary Chinese-Australian artist William Yang. Well-known as both a documentarian and as an active participant in interconnected emancipatory movements, Yang photographed the five dancers of AIDT (Lillian Crombie, Michael Leslie, Wayne Nicol, Richard Talonga, and Roslyn Watson) as they were preparing to travel to Nigeria. Within Yang’s lens, their intoxicating youthful joy is expressed in dreams for Black Australian empowerment as well as in the promise of a truly transnational Black Power movement. Having boarded to Lagos with unimaginable expectations, their epic trip was also affected by the repressive militaristic climate of post-Independence Nigeria and the lingering, cyclical violence left by British colonialism.

This thread echoes a decade later in the historic 1988 edition of Sydney’s famous Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. In the broader political life of the country, it was a year that marked “the Bicentennial,” touted as a national celebration of 200 years since the European invasion. Flouting the massively publicised tropes of colonial arrival, the dancer and NAISDA graduate Malcolm Cole led the first ever Aboriginal float by “crossdressing” as Captain Cook. Malcolm himself was a force of nature, as he is so often described by his peers. An Aboriginal and South Sea Islander from Far North Queensland, he was a pioneering figure in the history of contemporary dance in Australia. He left this world as a martyr of the AIDS pandemic, having also been a teacher, TV anchor, and an HIV/AIDS activist, attending the First National Aboriginal HIV/AIDS Conference in Alice Springs in 1992. His image is memorialised in perpetuity by photographers and artists, including Tracey Moffatt and William Yang, and reinterpreted in a large scale mural for the Biennale by Dylan Mooney. The non-White gaze of these artists best register Malcolm’s electrifying radiance. His subversion of Captain Cook has been re-enacted at this year’s Mardi Gras by Robert Cole, Malcolm’s twin brother, at the Biennale’s invitation. Ten Thousand Suns is more broadly indebted to Malcolm Cole’s solar spirit of irreverence and unapologetic presence.

As part of the 24th Biennale of Sydney, these threads, resources, and many histories have been compiled into a richly illustrated 360-page publication that is presented by the Biennale of Sydney and Griffith University. The Ten Thousand Suns book draws together new and existing essays, poetry, literary pieces, and first English translations of important historical texts, as well as documentation of all the 96 artists participating in this edition. With contributions by: Amelia Groom, Billie Phillips, Brontez Purnell, Carole Y. Johnson, Cosmin Costinaş, Ebonie Fifita-Laufilitoga-Maka, Elyas Alavi, Eric Michaels, Greg Dvorak, Hina Puamohala Kneubuhl, Hinatea Colombani, Inti Guerrero, John Puhiatau Pule, Karlie Noon, Kesaia Biuvanua, Krystal De Napoli, Laleen Jayamanne, Lillian Crombie, Margaret Cavendish, Michael Leslie,  Muhammadu Bello Kagara, Nevil Shute, Nikau Hindin, Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Rongomai Grbic-Hoskins, Roslyn Watson, Samia Khatun, Te Kuru O Te Marama Dewes, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Tony Albert, Vivian Ziherl, and VNS Matrix. 

—Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero, 24th Biennale of Sydney Artistic Directors