14/03/2026
The Biennale of Sydney opens today, Saturday March 14, at various sites across Sydney, including the impressive White Bay Power Station and Art Gallery of New South Wales. A leading and highly anticipated international contemporary art event, we are thrilled to share that Mangkaja artist John Prince Siddon was commissioned by Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and the Biennale of Sydney and is featured with a new collection of paintings on leather hides, canvas, repurposed oil drums and bullock skulls.
Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, the theme for this edition of the Biennale is Rememory - a means of revisiting, reconstructing, and reclaiming histories that have been erased or repressed. Rememory signifies the intersection of memory and history, where recollection becomes an act of reassembling fragments of the past—whether personal, familial, or collective.
In this installation Siddon engages with familiar Australian icons, including the Harbour Bridge, reimagining them as both inviting and unsettling. As audiences move among totemic oil drums, they encounter the intricate detail of his paintings, drifting between fragments of reality and memory. The histories of Fitzroy Crossing pulse beneath the surfaces, guiding audience across Country and city, past and present, where ancestral stories, colonial histories, and contemporary life intersect.
Working on canvas, oil drums, satellite dishes, kangaroo pelts, found bullock skulls, carved boab nuts, feathers and wood, Prince’s work is in his own words ‘all mixed up’; there are no rules or limits to his creative endeavours, instead all is a conduit for his artistic expression.
Thank you to the Biennale of Sydney, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Hoor Al Qasimi, Bruce Johnson McLean, Mankaja Arts and Emilia Galatis Projects.
