Review: Freo Biennale at Manjaree Precinct — Part Two

Fremantle Biennale Sanctuary 2025 at Manjaree Precinct — Part Two
Thursday, November 20 to Thursday, November 27, 2025

Returning to the Fremantle Biennale for its second week felt like returning to a world whose internal logic had quietly revealed itself. Pathways that felt exploratory in Week One now made sense, hidden corridors emerged, and the curatorial intent—quietly intelligent, steadily accumulating—came into focus. If the Manjaree Hub introduced sanctuary as something with edges and contradictions, this week’s visit stretched the idea across the city, inviting us to wander through the Biennale like players in an open-world environment. Not every space was peaceful; not every encounter was accessible. Several works leant heavily on strobing light, sensory overload and sonic intensity—provocative, yes, but also exclusionary in ways that deserve scrutiny.

What emerged, though, was a sense of navigation—not along a prescribed narrative arc, but through drifting, chance encounters, abrupt tonal shifts and unexpected detours. Meaning didn’t sit politely on a plinth; it skittered around corners or arrived in the dark while your eyes were still adjusting, rewarding those who dared venture from a prescribed path.

Ben Frost’s A Predatory Chord – Victoria Hall

Ben Frost’s A Predatory Chord unfolded in near-total darkness, a space that hummed like the lair of a living organism. The scale announced itself before you could even see it: huge sub-bass speakers crouched low on the ground, others hovering just above head height like dormant creatures. It was impossible to move through the space without feeling observed—either by the speakers, by strangers, or by something else entirely.

Beyond sound, light functioned as a key mechanic. The room pulsed from pitch-dark to brief, startling washes of purple, white and hot pink, the transitions keyed to the length of sustained sonic tones. Standing dead-centre, the light swaddled you—cocoon-like—before thinning into a soft strobing lattice. In those quieter pulses you began to register bodies within the field, silhouetted shapes you hadn’t realised were standing so close. The work turned viewers into responsive agents in a shared choreography: slow-moving, peering into voids, negotiating the shifting terrain of light and vibration.

Halfway through, everything dropped to silence and blackout—before a shrill tone threaded its way back in. It was not peaceful, nor was it meant to be. The sanctuary offered here was one of heightened awareness, not escape. Sound became physical: bass notes burbled against the speakers’ frames like compressed air blown against a taut surface. Moving close enough, the abrasion became visceral, and the noise hit your ribs like a physical reprimand.

The final pink glow brought something resembling warmth, though not comfort. If you managed to lie down, the room’s harmonic bed swallowed you. A sensory-deprivation-as-overload paradox. Self-obliteration. The sense of being folded into a vast chorus between whales, machines or spectral beasts, where you were not the protagonist but a witness. Sanctuary here wasn’t peaceful; it was a temporary handover of the self to something larger, hungrier, and pulsing.

LADAKH Biennale – Kakulas Sisters Basement

Descending into the basement beneath Kakulas Sisters felt like discovering a hidden side quest in a familiar map. Previously used as the site of New Bayswater’s flooded embassy, it now hosted a cultural exchange project with two artists represented by the Ladakh Biennale (Stanzin Tsepel and Arunima Dazess). Two works sat in quiet conversation: one a dual-screen projection of phone screens—FaceTime calls, scrolling through Spotify, jotted notes, and private moments laid bare. This wasn’t just voyeurism; it was a portrait of how private interiority now lives on devices that log, timestamp and misinterpret us in equal measure. It recalled Ninajirachi’s line that her computer might be the one entity that knows her best—and the unsettling accuracy of that thought.

Across from it, a delicate installation unfolded: salt and sand arranged in a quasi-mandala, mesh forms embroidered with vortex patterns casting hypnotic shadows. A sustained chime reverberated through the space, sacred rather than ominous. Moving from Frost’s vibrating abyss into this meditative tableau revealed something important about the Biennale’s curation: sanctuary could be meditative but also difficult; spiritual but also digital; exposed but also deeply interior.

Nepenthe (Summer Palace Ruins) – PS Art Space (PSAS)

At PSAS, Lawrence Lek’s Nepenthe Ruins turned sanctuary into something glitchy and liminal. A playable video-game artwork unfolded in romantic purple tones. You roamed through landscapes that felt equal parts ancient ruin and neon-lit futurism, with lens flares, ripple distortions and chromatic apparitions marking the vista. Transitional spaces—threshold zones where you momentarily forgot your mission—became the point. Rooms opened into other rooms without clear logic; water and polished floors adopted the same glassy solidity; text pop-ups delivered strange poetic haiku.

Across the room, a larger screen showed someone else playing the game, framed by a large ornate pale-blue neon border, creating an architectural portal. An AI voice narrated the artefacts encountered in a flat, speculative register. The work sat somewhere between immersive and meta: you were playing but also watching yourself play.

PSAS’s own architecture—its voids, poles and asymmetries—mirrored the instability onscreen. Sanctuary here wasn’t respite or a destination; it was a method of moving through uncertainty, an attitude towards wandering.

Ken Meyer’s Where the Light Rests – Lieutenants Mess

If the program image undersold this piece, the installation itself corrected the record: it was one of the Biennale’s most exhilarating surprises. In a(nother) darkened room, a beam of light shifted from deep blue to gold to vivid red, projected onto a sculpted topographic bowl. The effect was part eclipse, part beating heart, and part early-era video-game rendering of a portal opening. A synaptic chasm yawned on the wall ahead, a void beckoning through jittering motion that alternated between frenzy and whispered pulse.

At moments it felt like peering through eyelashes into a new dimension; at others, like the magic moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark where a shard of light unlocks a secret location on an ancient map. The soundtrack moved between electronic pulse and game-like atmospherics. The sanctuary here was speculative—a doorway you weren’t sure you should step through but couldn’t stop gazing into.

By week’s end, the Biennale’s curatorial intelligence revealed itself. Moving between these works—through basements, projection rooms, vibrating chambers and digital ruins—felt less like following an exhibition trail and more like roaming a map filled with portals, glitches, hidden lore and unexpected encounters.

In that sense, Fremantle itself became the sanctuary: not a place of rest, but a place of active navigation, where each encounter recalibrated your sense of self in relation to sound, light, bodies and thresholds. And like any good game world, it insisted that meaning was not found by following instructions—but by exploring what lay just off the main path.

CAT LANDRO