The Biennale of Sydney has today announced the artists, locations and initial programming for its 24th edition, titled Ten Thousand Suns, being presented free to the public from 9 March to 10 June 2024.

A major international art festival and the largest contemporary art event of its kind in Australia, the 24th Biennale of Sydney will be presented at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artspace, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and for the first time at Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, UNSW Galleries and at the iconic and recently restored White Bay Power Station.

With the artistic direction led by Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero, the 24th Biennale of Sydney proposes celebration as both a method and a source of joy, inspired by legacies of collective resistance and coming together to thrive in the face of injustice. With an exhibition of contemporary art at its core, the event draws from multiple histories, voices and perspectives, to explore connected thematic threads, from the celebration of the resurgence of First Nations technologies and knowledges, the history of Islam in Australia, to Queer resilience, and the international expression of Carnivale. The program also explores the atomic era, a concentrated time of climate alteration through human exploitation, within the context of today’s moment of climate emergency and a refusal to concede to an apocalyptic vision of the future.

Marking the Biennale of Sydney’s 50th anniversary year, the 2024 edition challenges Western fatalistic constructions of the apocalypse and embraces a hopeful outlook around a possible future lived in joy, produced in common and shared widely.

The 2024 edition will feature 88 artists and collectives from 47 countries including Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, Ukraine, United States of America, United Kingdom, Mexico, Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and Japan. Selected artists have practices firmly rooted in diverse communities and artistic vocabularies.

Featuring some of the most iconic photographs ever created alongside contemporary approaches to the photographic medium, Photography: Real & Imagined is the largest survey of the NGV’s Photography collection in the institution’s history and features more than 300 photographs by Australian and international practitioners.

Four years in the making, this landmark exhibition features photographs from across the 200-year period since the invention of photography in the 19th century, including work by leading international photographers including Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gilbert & George, and Nan Goldin, alongside Australian photographers Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Mervyn Bishop, Polly Borland, and Darren Sylvester.

Through twenty-one thematic sections, this large-scale exhibition explores the proposition that a photograph can be grounded in the real world, recording, documenting, and reflecting the world around us; or be the product of imagination, storytelling, and illusion; and on occasion operate in both realms. The thematic sections explore subject matter such as light, place and environment, consumption, conflict, community, and death.

Ngununggula, the Southern Highlands’ first regional art gallery, has commissioned ten Australian contemporary artists to create new works for the Gallery’s upcoming exhibition New Dog Old Tricks. Presented from 18 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, the exhibition invites the artists to re-think and question how we perceive dogs, and imagine the dog as a key to other physical and emotional worlds.

The commissioned artists include Billy Bain, David Griggs, Guido Maestri, Jason Phu, Julia Gutman, Madeleine Pfull, Marc Etherington, Nadia Hernández, Noel Mckenna and Todd Fuller. They will be presented alongside loaned artworks from the Art Gallery of NSW, National Gallery of Victoria and private collections by artists including Jeff Koons, Adam Cullen, Aleks Danko, Richard Walker, Del Kathryn Barton, Louise Hearman and William Wegman.