Festival
The 2025 Fremantle Biennale – Tom Mùller’s last as artistic director – opens up the idea of sanctuary. By Kosa Monteith.
The 2025 Fremantle Biennale
Sanctuary, a sanctum for protecting that which is holy or held sacred: removed from the world, therefore impervious. Fremantle sits at Australia’s western edge, but it is not isolated. Tides of thought flow through this liminal space and grow into new artistic visions. “Sanctuary”, as imagined at the 2025 Fremantle Biennale, is porous, uncertain, inviting: not acts of retreat and exclusion. Beyond gods, beyond ourselves, what can we hold sacred?
From November 13-30, a program of predominantly free and accessible “site-responsive” art seeps into the public spaces of Fremantle/Walyalup. Site-responsive commissions demand intimacy with space. Artists visited, developed and built “living sites”: 115 artists, 25 commissions, more than 90 events. To capture it all here would be like capturing a city.
Sites are not always hospitable. We crowd at Manjaree Precinct (Bathers Beach) for opening night. Strong sea winds whip away speeches, blasting chill against us, but we see the smoke of the Welcome to Country, the dance poles of Worrorra artist Leah Umbagai’s Wodoi & Jungun, and the rhythm in ceremonies of gathering and peace. Sanctuary is explored at the biennale, in artistic director Tom Mùller’s words, as “a reminder that amidst chaos there are spaces, both real and imagined, that shelter, protect and restore”. We stay, huddled together instinctively, seeking protection.
Our animal movement has echoes in Ben Frost’s A Predatory Chord: not flocking but murmuration. The soundscape installation in Victoria Hall emulates the murmuration of birds moving together to evade predators. Originally commissioned for the Rolex Arts Festival, it is adapted to new habitats. Forty-two speakers hover suspended, transposing flight into a tooth-shaking vibration of unpredictable, living sculptural sound. Notes swell, retreat and converge, reactive, pursued around a hazy room, dropping into silence. Pressed by a velvet weight of light pulsing in an ever-changing rhythm, it has an anxious, affective power. The sanctuary feels illusory: the configurations are endless, without escape.
Perceptions of sanctuaries are destabilised in Pool of Content, where an alternate version of life decentres human narrative. Artists Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler’s work mirrors the pink salt lakes and halophilic microorganisms in a series of trays filled with salt sculpture. Formed in natural evaporative processes, the crystal landscapes are generated by a nonhuman collaborator. They climb, bunch and cling to stone and wood, forming what Lawler calls “interventions of nature” in the colonial structure of Old Customs House. They speak to climate futures of a post-human hyper-saline world, inhospitable to us, returning possibly to pre-human supremacy of other life. “The world is a sanctuary for something,” Lawler says. Not anthropomorphised, but still holding wonder.
“Cultural sanctuaries”, by comparison, are deeply human. Wodoi & Jungun is a major work by Umbagai, with Totem and story from the Worrorra, Ngarinyin and Wunambal (Mowanjum) people of the north-west Kimberley. As part of this, she reimagines traditional dance poles with contemporary materials, their remaking a part of acts of continuous creation and persistence. In Sanctuary Within, Muriel Hillion, Kaloune and Salama share musical traditions of Réunion Island, a French department in the Indian Ocean with slave and colonial histories. Forms of music such as Maloya become sanctuary: “a song with people, not for people”, dance and call-and-response where each iteration is unique, cutting euphoric shapes in the present.
Sanctuaries can be connected in landscape. Fremantle Biennale is twinned in an exchange with the sā Ladakh Biennale, a festival centred on “land art”. Two residency pieces feature here, as well as a work by co-founder Raki Nikahetiya. Nikahetiya’s multisensory piece Fifty Thousand Years, Or For As Long As We Remember offers stories literally grounded here, exploring, he says, “where people inhabit landscapes and find belonging”. Beneath hanging fabric, small speakers in mounds of earth play anecdotal narrations of identity. You bend to meet them, your ear pressed to a hollow tube.
In Lawrence Lek’s Nepenthe, lost landscapes find home. Named for the Ancient Greek cure for grief, Nepenthe remakes a neon echo of the destroyed Summer Palace of Beijing as an exploratory video game world. Quest-markers speak of ghost builders, loss, rebirth and forgetting. Nepenthe only exists here because it is no longer there, an imaginary sanctuary where what’s gone can be saved from oblivion.
Other sanctuaries draw us to face out. Sound Sauna on Manjaree reconfigures retreat as refocus: a floor-to-ceiling window floods body and mind with the ocean, waves intertwining with music and spoken word. Swim and return; sweat and sea interchangeable saltwaters. Nearby, the Monastery of New Bayswater invites us into the religious outpost of artist Jessee Lee Johns’ imaginary country, where volunteer “acolytes” stay overnight as hosts.
With Veil (Heddwch A Tawelu Yma, Peace and Quiet Here), artist and photographer Duncan Wright weaves a “posthumous collaboration” with his grandfather, a landscape artist. In a temporary wooden shed is his grandfather’s own shed, the walls covered in his handwritten notes and dates, transported and transformed with a camera obscura. The landscape is inverted, waves of the sea behind boil like the underside of a storm in time lapse, a marvel of swimming birds and hovering people. We are invited to see and feel the place beyond a simple gaze.
Sites also respond. Wind interferes, salt grows stalactites that drip onto the floor, unfamiliar speakers malfunction. In Vespers, dreamlike siren synths and ghostly lullabies play from five boats weaving around Waylen Bay at sunset. A windsurfer drifts unexpectedly into the centre, lingering as the singing boats circle. Such replies make works inextricable from this place – an ephemeral moment.
Room Service could be a festival microcosm. This two-night immersive experience, co-curated by Danielle Caruana and Mùller, takes place in the historic P&O Hotel. It’s a living experiment in “the limitations of space, and what limitation creates”, Caruana says. Forty artists occupy 32 hotel rooms. Over two nights, guests will move through a warren of unexpected performance, from a staged dinner party to live tattoo artistry and a cabaret where the bed’s a stage. Hotel rooms, spaces of uniformity and privacy, become public, audiences active in “remythologising” a site holding more than a century of communal memory.
It’s a conversation with Fremantle. The city is filled with vacant spaces in the wake of gentrification. Activating these sites holds art at the centre and keeps its distinctiveness alive. Room Service, and this biennale, plants the guerilla thought: What if these spaces belonged to community instead of commerce? If people had the keys to their city, what sanctuaries could they create together?
The Fremantle Biennale runs until November 30.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 22, 2025 as "Safe spaces".
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