Review: Fremantle Biennale at Manjaree Precinct — Part One

Fremantle Biennale Sanctuary 2025 at Manjaree Precinct — Part One
Thursday, November 13 to Thursday, November 20, 2025 

If this year’s Fremantle Biennale hangs its hat on Sanctuary, then the Manjaree Precinct could be considered a curious starting point. Wedged between the ocean’s hard winds, the tourist churn of Bathers Beach and the Fishing Boat Harbour, this nestled “hub” is anything but sheltered. Our initial impression on the first weekend of the Biennale’s 18-day stretch—walking into the makeshift community kitchen with its open walls—was of a space doing battle with the elements. If this was a sanctuary, it was despite the elements, not because of them.

But perhaps that’s the point. Sanctuary here is not a retreat from the world; it’s an ongoing negotiation with it—a theme that unfurls across every work in this coastal pocket of the Biennale’s program.

Whalers Tunnel – Wind, Sound, and Gentle Chaos

The first work to reorient me was the series of wind-responsive flag forms installed by Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey, Vuth Lyno and Pal Panha through the old Whaler’s Tunnel: Exhalation. Even before you see the installation, you feel the passage acting as a natural wind tunnel, drawing bodies through its length. The flags—yellow dot-like constellations on black—resembled microbial arrays or spiky botanicals, an ambiguous biological diagram flickering against the stone.

Watching them lift and tilt—each behaving on its own whim—you fell into their gentle visual rhythm. The accompanying sound, droning strings and a lone, wordless vocal, softened the rush. A Cambodian effect hovered over the melody, drawing a meditative through-line while couples tucked themselves romantically into the arches. A beautiful accident of shelter. After the beach’s brutality, this quiet portal felt like the Biennale’s first true exhale.

Monastery of New Bayswater – An Inhabitable Threshold

Jesse Lee Johns’ Monastery of New Bayswater, perched on the North Mole, is modest enough to miss if you’re not looking for it—part trailer, part hermit’s cell. My first encounter felt almost accidental: a miniature home squeezed between vehicles, dusted with Johns’ familiar aesthetic—old chicken bones, hand-painted faux-brickwork, small twig cages and burnt crackers in an offering bowl.

Unlike the more interactive Commonwealth of New Bayswater, this iteration is less a space to enter. Returning the following week, the door was propped open: a sparse fit-out with a loft bed and kitchenette, the barest bones of a life inside, suggesting an unseen acolyte could be pottering about. But as a “monastery”, its inaccessibility felt apt—sanctuary here is a threshold, solitary rather than communal.

Sound Sauna – Heat, Vulnerability and Oceanic Theatre

Perth’s beachside sauna craze may confound some—who volunteers for a schvitz on purpose?—but the promise of curated ambience was enough to lure the likes of me. Our 5pm session fell in the magic hour: the light softened, wind lulled, and inside the cedar room, heat wrapped around us with slow insistence. Leon Ewing’s score eased us between meditative tones and textured pulses that felt more invigorating than restful.

Through the window, the ocean became a theatre. Seagulls dived and twisted. Bathers plunged into cold water and looked back at us. Seaweed clumped in frothy knots, tide churning. To the right, the Monastery perched like an outpost; to the left, a dance work unfolded, a woman returning bucketed water to the ocean. Sitting amongst strangers, negotiating discomfort and sensory immersion, pushed the sauna into the realm of performance art. Heartbeats synced to heat, sound and breath—this was sanctuary as shared vulnerability.

Community Kitchen – Food as Sanctuary

Across the Biennale, the Community Kitchen hosts shared meals and workshops offering cultural exchange—on our first visit, we lucked out with a free Cambodian lunch curated by the Exhalation artists. Their instructions guided us through the assembly of the dish, passing on knowledge and nourishment. The curatorial gesture here is simple but generous: sanctuary emerging through hospitality, cultural transmission, and the very old human instinct to gather around food.

Veil – A Camera Obscura for the Windblown

Back on the beach, Duncan Wright’s Veil offered sanctuary in a nostalgic yet foreboding liminal space: a camera obscura built inside a wooden shed that houses a second tin shed—a found object etched with family inscriptions and history. You sit with your back to the lens; gradually, the world comes into focus upside down.

Watching the tide crawl backwards and tiny figures stroll across the shed ceiling was disarming and poetic. Sanctuary here was contemplative, intimate and slightly uncanny. Beachgoers ducked in to escape the wind—finding a small, unexpected pocket of respite in the dark.

Pool of Content – Sanctuary as Transformation

The short walk from Manjaree into the Old Customs House felt like entering yet another sanctuary—one sheltered from the elements, washed in the building’s signature natural light. Here, the festival’s most quietly staggering work unfolds over time, a mesmerising installation slowly colonising the room: Moon Bae and Charlie Lawler’s Pool of Content.

The installation meets you first as a soft pink glow: metal loops and stones arranged amongst shallow trays of liquid, already furred with salt crystals. Within days—just three, according to the invigilator—the crystals had begun to propagate with startling velocity. Some formed delicate ice-like lattices; others clumped into thick, jagged outcrops, like miniature islands pushing out of a pink sea.

Further along, these large-scale petri dishes bloomed with vivid crystalline forms, each a tiny evolving landscape. The work cried out for a time-lapse to reveal their accelerated growth.

Here, sanctuary was recast through an ecological lens. Salt—usually associated with preservation, or barrenness—became a metaphor for adaptation, persistence, and inevitable transformation. Rather than offering refuge, the work imagined sanctuary as something reclaimed or overtaken, something porous and in motion. It asks: Who is doing the colonising? What forms of life flourish when others recede?

The room itself amplifies this tension. Customs House, with its colonial architecture and airy whiteness, becomes a host body. The crystals grow like insurgent forms within it—slow, patient, relentless. Within the Biennale’s larger context, the work reframed sanctuary not as safety from change but as the radical acceptance that change will come, and from unexpected (or inhuman) places.

Manjaree, as a central precinct, doesn’t offer sanctuary in the literal sense—you won’t find much shelter from the Walyalup wind. Instead, you find something far more compelling: a series of encounters that ask what sanctuary looks like when it must be built, rebuilt, and continuously negotiated. A fitting beginning for a festival committed to site, community, and the messy, beautiful work of being together.

CAT LANDRO