Wild post-colonial boys

First published on 3 Jun 2010. Updated on 2 Aug 2010.

On a sunny day on Cockatoo Island, Brook Andrew surveys his latest artwork with dismay. "Why isn't anyone jumping on it?" he wonders. It's not as silly a question as you might think. The Melbourne-based artist has fashioned a full-size bouncy castle - albeit a more sombre one than you'll find at school fêtes. A large, black, spectral figure stands in its centre, arms aloft, and its four turrets contain dangling human skulls.

Andrew's contribution to the 17th Biennale of Sydney invites play for a serious purpose. "It's a memorial to the forgotten or dispossessed - people who have been taken from their land or massacred," he says. The castle's zigzag patterning is a traditional design of Andrew's tribe, the Wiradjuri. In an inversion of the usual rules of play, Andrew says that persons under the age of 16 are forbidden to jump on the castle as they might enjoy it without contemplating the appropriateness of doing so.

The work is one of several that explore the Biennale theme ‘Songs of Survival'. Indigenous peoples who have survived suppression and marginalisation are finding new means of expression in contemporary art. And their plight is not invisible to artists from divergent non-indigenous cultures. On three television monitors in an old shed a few metres away from the bouncy castle, the 21 performers of the Finnish ‘shouting choir', Mieskuoro Huutajat, are speaking and yelling the text of Kevin Rudd's landmark 2008 apology to the stolen generations.

"I normally take texts that are linked with the country we visit," explains Petri Sirvïo, the group's composer and figurehead. National anthems are his favoured material, so why this particular speech? "I tracked the discussion [in Australia] following the 'Sorry' speech and found very interesting sentiments. One third of people said it was very nice. One third said ‘this is a politician's speech' and one third said ‘there's no reason to say sorry.'"

Are the accidents of history best left buried? Or is the past, as William Faulkner had it, not dead, and not even past? Back across the harbour at the MCA, Auckland artist Brett Graham recalls visiting the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and learning that the very first overseas deployment of Australian troops, in 1845, was against his very people, the Tainui. "I got a hell of a shock," he says.

Graham is showing two bellicose sculptures: a BDRM-2 Russian armoured scout car and a Stealth Bomber. The surface of each black, sinister war machine is covered in Maori carvings. It's Graham's modern-day tribute to the Maori practice of carving the butts of muskets captured from their English invaders. "There's that fantasy of ‘what if we'd had weapons as big as theirs?'" he explains.

Upstairs, the art of Canadian Kent Monkman also playfully rewrites history in favour of one of its losers. His gorgeous, large-scale paintings are modelled on 19th-century ‘New World' landscapes of the American frontier by the likes of Albert Bierstad. To the scenes he has added his drag alter-ego, ‘Miss Chief Eagle Testikle', and has him/her interacting with natives and cowboys in a quasi-sexual, quasi-mystical way.

Monkman's heritage is Cree and he identifies as a ‘berdache' - a native North American ‘two-spirit', or female spirit in a male body. His work interrogates how sexuality was colonised at the same time as North America was. "The berdache persona met with resistance from colonial artists who didn't understand it," he says. "George Catlin, a painter who created an enormous body of work about Native American people, wrote in his journals how he wished this custom to be ‘extinguished forever'. This from a purported ethnologist!"