Sydney Biennale: Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Ceramic Dingo Skulls Take on New Resonance After Queensland Tragedy
A cluster of seven dingo skulls, rendered in ceramic and paired with sound, is not the kind of image that stays politely on the wall. At White Bay Power Station in Sydney, the Indigenous American artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (b. 1979) has installed “Volume III White Bay Power Station,” a work that moves between sculpture and atmosphere, asking visitors to listen as much as they look.
The installation is part of “Rememory: the 25th Biennale of Sydney,” on view March 14 to June 14. But in recent days, the piece has acquired an unintended immediacy: it is being encountered amid heightened public attention to dingoes following a tragedy in Queensland involving the death of a backpacker.
Luger’s work does not illustrate the news. Instead, it sits in the uneasy space where cultural symbols, fear, and projection accumulate. The dingo, an animal freighted with myth and controversy in Australia, becomes here a vessel for questions about how societies narrate danger, innocence, and belonging. By choosing ceramic — a material associated with fragility and care, but also with archaeological endurance — Luger turns the skull into something simultaneously intimate and monumental.
The Biennale’s curatorial frame, “Rememory,” further complicates the encounter. The term suggests more than recollection; it implies the return of what has been suppressed, misremembered, or forcibly forgotten. Within that context, “Volume III White Bay Power Station” can be read as a meditation on the afterlives of stories: how they are repeated, revised, and weaponized, and how they settle into public consciousness.
The work’s setting matters, too. White Bay Power Station, an industrial site repurposed for the Biennale, lends the installation a charged acoustics and a sense of scale that resists easy consumption. The skulls’ presence — spare, insistent, and materially precise — becomes a kind of anchor in a cavernous space, while the sound component shapes the viewer’s pace and attention.
In Australia, reporter Elizabeth Fortescue has been tracking how the installation is being discussed as the Queensland tragedy reverberates through the national conversation. The overlap has made the work newly legible to audiences arriving with fresh headlines in mind, even as the piece itself remains rooted in broader questions of memory, responsibility, and the narratives that attach themselves to bodies — human and animal alike.
“Rememory: the 25th Biennale of Sydney” continues through June 14, with Luger’s installation standing as one of its most quietly disquieting encounters: a work that feels less like a statement than a pressure point, revealing how quickly meaning can shift when art meets the present tense.
