Fremantle Biennale 2023

SIGNALS 23

Kambarang: 3-19 November 2023

The Fremantle Biennale 2023 starts with a drone show at Bathers Beach on Friday evening 3 November 2023. Now in its fourth year SIGNALS will explore themes of movement and communication across distances, from the ocean to the island at different venues around Freo.
Major international and Australian artists will come to Fremantle for the festival, including:

IMMERSIVE & EXPERIENTIAL INSTALLATION

Paris-based light/sound studio NONOTAK will activate the vacant Elders Woolstores for the first time in over 30 years.
Audio installation project, The Port’s Call by Tom Supple and Byron Scullin, will echo across the Fremantle Port harbour, signalling the arrival and departure of large vessels with harmonic, reverberating soundscapes.
Papua New Guinea-born Brisbane-based artist Taloi Havini, exhibitor at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 and Istanbul Biennale 2022, will premier large-scale channel sonic installation Kastoms in the iconic Old Customs House.
The Yellow Bus will journey to Fremantle with its roving, multi-media exhibition, talks and film screenings focused on Yindjibarndi history and culture.
Still Lives: Fremantle by Luke George and Daniel Kok will explore seafaring, and movement of bodies through a durational, site-specific performance installation aboard a historic pearl lugger.
Fremantle-based visual artist Sam Bloor will bring the Elders Woolstores facade to life with flesh to bone, penning a short poem to Fremantle.
Sustainably designed architectural pavilion Er Pavilion will be created by architects vittinoAshe and collaborators outside Fremantle’s J-Shed, offering a space for music events, talks, workshops and more.
At PS Art Space artists Rob Kettels and Bori Benko will create kinetic installations and electromechanical animation devices titled Resonant.

MUSIC, DANCE & PERFORMANCE

Brooklyn based surrealist blues poet and storyteller aja monet will collaborate with local musicians to present ‘when the poems do what they do’ an exclusive album launch and masterclass with Centre for Stories.
Fremantle’s historic C-Shed will host CEASE/FIRE, an electric contemporary dance work by choreographers May Greenberg and Zee Zunnur with composer Felicity Groom.
A partnership with STRUT Dance and Tura New Music, will see choreographer Laura Boynes present a new participatory contemporary dance, The Great Divide.
Timmah Ball and Kate Jama will present Aqueous Archives, an immersive publication told through storytelling, archival activism, text and paste ups centering the Fremantle Port in its current and former states.
A new creative learning project, Whale Song is a collaboration between Fremantle Biennale, WA artists Jess Day and Alex Desebrock and the Year 4/5 students from local school’s Beaconsfield Primary School and East Hamilton Hill Primary School.
SIGNALS 23 invites a conversation of new works by artists from across Australia and beyond in forms of action, gesture and sound. This new program for the Fremantle Biennale’s fourth festival, invites encounters and experiences that look to the far edges and the far away, to shifting landscapes and sea voyages, to arrivals and departures at the ocean edge. In the same way that signals change, swayed by language, sight and sound, so too will our festival embrace transformation, renewal and new ways of seeing toward the future.
SIGNALS 23 will take place throughout Fremantle, tracing the manjaree (Fremantle foreshore), and the historic West End precinct. Looking across the wardan (ocean) the Biennale will also engage with Wadjemup (Rottnest Island) and travel upstream to Dyoondalup (Attadale).

References and Links

Program

SIGNALS 23 website.

Freotopia

This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 29 October, 2023 and hosted at freotopia.org/arts/biennale2023/index.html (it was last updated on 9 November, 2023). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.