Low Kee Hong, fresh from curating a landmark exhibition and performance by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, has been named as the artistic director of the 26th Biennale of Sydney, due to take place in 2028.
Low is the creative director of Factory International, the arts organisation in Manchester, where the exhibition Ai Weiwei: Button Up! is on until 6 September.
The 25th Biennale of Sydney, which closed on 14 June, was beset by controversy. Artistic director Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi was criticised when she failed to turn up at the Biennale media preview. She said she wanted the artists to be free to speak for themselves. Then a police investigation was undertaken into comments by DJ Haram (Zubeyda Muzeyyen) on the biennale’s opening night. The case was dropped because of insufficient evidence to commence legal proceedings on the grounds of racial hate or terrorism advocacy.
Low, a friend of Al Qasimi, “is one of the most distinctive voices working in contemporary multi-artform curation internationally”, the Biennale of Sydney’s organisers said in a statement introducing him as the next artistic director.
Low tells The Art Newspaper that connecting with Indigenous communities in Australia would be key to how he shapes the biennale. This would be in line with his approach to previous arts festivals.
“The way that Indigenous communities have influenced some of my practice is to think about time span and time scales beyond just the three months (of the biennale), but to think very expansively into hundreds of thousands of years,” Low says.
He says he is aware of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that is taking public evidence in Sydney following the mass shooting of Jewish people at Bondi Beach last year. Racial hatred “is happening everywhere”, he adds. “This is the world we’re living in. It’s all about division—us and them, black and white. [The biennale] is a moment to really deeply reflect together with artists and to think: through art, is there a space for deep listening and nuanced conversations?”
Low continues: “With the intensity of social media, we tend not to want to have deep conversations. It’s just very quick things—a like or a share, and you’re done with an issue. I think it’s important that art has that place to allow us to have difficult and challenging conversations, even though everybody else is insisting that you can’t and that you shouldn’t.”
The most recent edition of the Biennale of Sydney drew criticism that one of its major venues, the White Bay Power Station, is too big and overpowers the art displayed in it. But Low says he is not deterred by the scale of even the most cavernous art space.
“Manchester is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution so there are many old mills, factories and depots and these are sites the Manchester International Festival (produced by Factory International) uses a lot,” he says.
Prior to joining Factory International in 2022, Low was the founding director and general manager of the Singapore Biennale, the artistic director and general manager of the Singapore Arts Festival, an associate artistic director of TheatreWorks (in Singapore) and the head of theatre and performing arts at the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in Hong Kong.
The Biennale of Sydney’s chief executive officer Barbara Moore predicts Low’s vision will offer “warmth and kindness, embracing a shared sense of humanity through difference and change”.
Ai Weiwei worked with Low to undertake his first 24-hour durational performance, Sewing a Button, as part of the ongoing exhibition in Manchester. In the performance, Ai reenacted the brutal conditions he endured during his 81-day detention in 2011, when he lived in a single cell under constant surveillance and regular interrogation. This followed the artist’s arrest at Beijing Capital International Airport. Seven years later, Ai contributed a monumental inflatable work to the 21st edition of the Biennale of Sydney.