The Woke Paradox

As 2024 came to an end, there were four exhibitions in Sydney that offered a more nuanced and thought-provoking consideration of our rapidly changing world, and its many challenges to existing norms and traditions. This was in stark contrast to what has been the preoccupations of various institutions over the past two decades.

What sets us apart from other creatures is our ability to communicate using a series of vocal symbols. As the distinguish British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has commented, “language is the most remarkable and the most characteristic of all human creations.”

What is also remarkable, more often than not, is that these vocal symbols transmogrify over time, changing the meaning and thus reception of particular words. Take “woke” as an example. Its origin is in African American English, and from the 1930s has been used to highlight the social and political issues impacting African Americans. However, in the early 2000s, its meaning began to metastasise—championed by the political Left—to include other historically marginalised groups, taking in issues such as social inequality, racial injustice, sexual preference and identity politics, and Indigenous politics, particularly land rights in Australia.

In last year’s Biennale of Sydney, titled Ten Thousand Suns, there was a focus on minorities or those living and working on the geographical and political margins. This Biennale was certainly the most woke since its establishment in 1973. Much was made in the accompanying wall texts and online summaries of the struggles and prejudice that each artist had confronted in their life. The problem was that the personal stories—and there were some truly harrowing stories of survival—were used as a scaffold to support or justify what was in most cases just bad art. To be fair, there were of course among the hodgepodge of works some pieces that did rise above the mediocre, although these appeared to have been included for their historical significance. Depending on your political viewpoint, describing the Biennale as woke is to acknowledge that art can or should be concerned with these issues. However, those who are right-leaning tend to use woke as a signifier of cultural elitism or an attack on free speech, and thus wield it as an insult.

This focus on the marginalised or artists that present as victims is now a common theme of recent global biennales and museums of contemporary art, with curators rushing to prove their woke bona fides. Rather ironically, I would speculate that this is in part due to a lack of government financial support of cultural institutions, who must now go cap in hand to corporations seeking sponsorship. The Biennale of Sydney, along with many other cultural institutions, has been captured by the neoliberal or global corporate strategy of “greenwashing” and what the cultural scientists Akane Kanai and Rosalind Gill describe as “woke capitalism.” Both greenwashing and woke capitalism are used by corporations to demonstrate their progressive values (whether actual or not). This strategy is often referred to as “virtue signalling,” as the corporations include in advertising “mascots” that represent marginalised groups. While this can impower those that are marginalised it can also generate a hostile response from the broader public who may perceive that a particular group is being given special treatment. All this was evident in the abject failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023, which was heavily supported by major corporations including Qantas, Westpac, the Commonwealth Bank, BHP, and both Coles and Woolworths, among many others.

So, as 2024 drew to a close, it was a wonder to see that there were four exhibitions in Sydney that didn’t seek to impose an overt political agenda, air a laundry list of grievances, or berate audiences for some perceived offence or transgression. These exhibitions were instead exploratory, cognisant of a changing world and many traditions, posing questions and asking the viewer to engage with complex ideas. Most importantly, each artist had a sophisticated understanding of the aesthetics required of art.

The first of these exhibitions was Once Again … (Statues Never Die), 2022, at the Museum of Contemporary Australia (MCA) by the British, now California based artist, Isaac Julien. Curiously, this exhibition was presented earlier in 2024 at the Whitney Biennial in New York. Does the inclusion of Julien’s work herald a shift in what curators are concerned with?

Once Again … is a strikingly immersive five-screen, black and white new media installation that explores the relationship between the US self-made millionaire, educator, philanthropist, and art collector Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951) and African American philosopher and educator Alain Locke (1885–1954). Locke was a key figure of the 1920s cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

The influence of film noir is evident in Once Again … through the use of dramatic lighting but without its menacing qualities. In this work Julien attempts to understand the compulsive and aggressive collecting of other cultures’ artefacts by Western institutions, in this case the Barnes Foundation. However, he does this with a poetic fluency and without the didactic tedium that usually accompanies such work, offering the audience instead a discussion about African art and its place in global art history. At the same time, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery showed Julien’s series of large-scale dramatic photographic works that are essentially hero shots from Once Again . . . . This exhibition was an extension of the MCA show, so I counted them as one project.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) commissioned the Australian artist Angelica Mesiti, now based in France, to produce an immersive, new media installation work for the Tank. The Tank is a former wartime oil bunker beneath Naala Badu, which in everyday vernacular is known as Sydney Modern. The work’s title, The Rites of When, 2024, is an obvious homage to Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Using choreographed dance sequences and music, Mesiti plays with the seasonal rhythms and festivals that have been lost to those who no longer live an agrarian life.

The Tank is a 2,200-square-meter chamber with 125 columns supporting the ceiling and is a notoriously difficult space for artists to use. Mesiti’s The Rites of When is certainly the most successful use of the Tank to date. This may be because she worked with the exhibition designer Simon de Dreuille to install seven vertical screens that echo the columns and allow an uninterrupted circular viewing experience. The Rites of When offers a subtle and compelling view of life’s endless cycle without sermonising or patronising the audience. In the subdued darkness of the Tank the experience was perplexingly uplifting.

After experiencing these two highly polished multimedia and multivocal installations, created with large production teams and professional actors, on the same day, the short walk through the original Walter Vernon designed AGNSW to the Asian Lantern galleries was like stepping through Alice’s looking glass. Here Korean-born artist Lee Ufan (who lives between France and Japan) shows four paintings and four site-specific installations in a series of spaces he designed, part of his ongoing Relatum series, commenced in 1968. This iteration of his oeuvre is titled Quiet Resonance and continues his enquiry into Ma, which Ufan describes as the “the void or emptiness.” He first became interested in this and other metaphysical concepts in the 1960s as a reaction against Western modernism and technology, and he eventually co-founded the mono-ha movement, which translates as “School of Things.” This group believed in not “making art” because technology had made the making of art “obsolete,” and they advocated turning to objects found in the natural world, such as rocks, but also man-made materials already in existence.

In Relatum – position, 1968–2024, a rock is placed on the edge of a circle drawn on the ground and is illuminated with a single white light globe. In Relatum – to heaven road, 2024, the floor space is covered in fine white marble pebbles, with two rocks sitting on either side of the long curving perspex mirror that reflects the rocks. I observed some hesitation on the part of the gallery audience who were not sure whether walking on the pebbles was permissible. Yet, after a few moments the soft sound of people crossing the threshold, almost in reverence, created an enigmatic rhythm in the space. In these works, and the other two installations, Ufan has created a Zen-influenced sanctuary for our post-truth and Instagram world that is very still, silent, and allows for the possibility of deep reflection.

Leaving the museums behind, the last of the quartet of exhibitions I saw was at Mais Wright—certainly one of Australia’s most innovative commercial galleries. Here, Debra Phillips showed the second part of her series Saline that follows on from an earlier exhibition of the same name, presented at Void_Melbourne gallery in March 2024.

Phillips is known for working across various platforms and has employed different strategies in her work for over four decades, encompassing photographic self-portraits, installations, and public art commissions, such as Viva Voce, 1999. However, she is perhaps best known for her use of large-format analogue film, where she questions who has agency over contested histories. As an archivist of her own work, she has assembled an extensive collection of negatives from the 1980s onwards. Phillips uses this reservoir of images as a resource, which she shifts and sorts through to produce new work, although there may be a suspension of time between taking the image and when it is printed. As Phillips has said, “[it is] my interest in the relationship between the two moments that are integral to any photograph: the time an image is taken and, later, when the image is printed or set into virtual circulation.”

In the exhibition Saline, the majority of Phillips’ works were large-scale photographs made using pigment inkjet technology rather than traditional darkroom printing, which gives each print an intensity as though the subject is being marinated in a bath of colour. The images, which have been digitally manipulated, move easily between hazy and full focus, creating an athetised effect similar to looking through a kaleidoscope, where the world is disintegrating. Once again, Phillips has returned to fragments of gardens as her subject in these works, but I was left to ponder whether she is setting our worst moral impulses against our own best interests, with the actual subject, albeit camouflaged, our mistreatment of the ecosystem. That ambiguity is the real strength of this work.

After seeing these four exhibitions I recalled the US writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag’s response when, in 1977, she was asked what the role of the writer or artist is—she said it is to pierce the narcotic veil of “organised hallucinations” that society produces daily, and that pass for reality. As we enter an era of falsehoods, post-truth politics, and fiction, it is crucial for the artist not to produce more hallucinations of their own, but to critique the dominant ones that function as the doxas (or beliefs) of our “administered life.” Now, more than ever, this is the challenge for anyone who claims to be an artist.

Exhibition
Isaac Julien: Once Again … (Statues Never Die)
27 September 2024 – 16 February 2025
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney

Angelica Mesiti: The Rites of When
21 September 2024 – 11 May 2025
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Lee Ufan: Quiet Resonance
31 August 2024 – 30 September 2025
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Debra Phillips: Saline
12 October – 9 November 2024
Mais Wright, Sydney

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.
Images courtesy of the artists, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Mais Wright, Sydney.