UNSW Galleries is a venue for the 24th Biennale of Sydney, ‘Ten Thousand Suns', a major international contemporary art event. 'Ten Thousand Suns' departs from an acknowledgement of a multiplicity of perspectives, cosmologies, and ways of life that have always woven together the world under the sun. This central life-giving body, like the world it shines light upon, has otherwise been known under thousands of different words in as many languages. But many of these cultural viewpoints have in fact not relied on a vision of a single sun. A multiplicity of suns conveys ambiguous images. It evokes a scorching world, both in several cosmological visions and very much in our moment of climate emergency. But it also conveys the joy of cultural multiplicities affirmed, of First Nations understandings of the cosmos brought to the fore, and of carnivals as forms of resistance in contexts that have surpassed colonial oppression. The 24th Biennale of Sydney works with these different layers of meaning, acknowledging the deep ecological crises derived from colonial and capitalist exploitation while refusing to concede to an apocalyptic vision of the future. This politics of doom are seen as an attempt by the same forces that have caused these multiple crises to control possibilities to overcome them. The 24th Biennale of Sydney proposes instead solar and radiant forms of resistance that affirm collective possibilities around a future that is not only possible, but necessary to be lived in joy and plenitude, produced in common and shared widely. Around this central theme and ethos, the 24th Biennale of Sydney goes deeper into different connected threads. One of them is the history and the imagination around the atomic era, as a concentrated version of the history of climate alteration through human exploitation, but also as a specific history that places Australia at the core of the atomic era which has largely been staged in the broader Pacific region. Another thread follows a lineage of largely repressed or misconstrued moments that have been crucial in the history of Australia and have involved relations with the Muslim world. These include the complex exchanges between First Nations and Muslim Makassars over many centuries; the history of cameleers from across South and West Asia, trafficked to the country in the 19th century and later exiled due to the introduction of the White Australia policy; the formation of an Australian national identity as a consequence to the loss at Gallipoli in the First World War, orchestrated from London as an anti-jihad preventive campaign; Australia’s history of racist anti-migration policies, as well as the broader role that Islamophobia plays in processes of othering in contemporary life in the country. — Artistic Directors: Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain First Nations Curatorial Fellow: Tony Albert (Kuku Yalanji) Curatorial Advisor: Vivian Ziherl Artwork Image: Elyas Alavi, Cheshme-e jaan (The Spirit Spring), (detail), 2023. Photograph: Andrew Curtis. Courtesy the artist.