Grass is greener for this year’s Biennale of Sydney surprise

Other ideas are more sinuous. “The Biennale is like a river,” Roca said. “It begins with an idea which is water and conflict, and then it branches out into many things like the rights of nature, the voice of interspecies.”

At The Cutaway in Barangaroo, Filipino artist Leeroy New – creator of Lady Gaga’s muscle dress – will present a flotilla of floating vessels constructed from recycled plastic bottles. This will speak to incursions of Chinese ships in the West Philippine Sea.

The last male northern white rhinoceros will be brought back to virtual life in a work by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg that asks why humans obsess over creating new life forms while neglecting those almost extinct.

Ackroyd and Harvey aim to draw an intrinsic link between the photosynthesis power of plants and the health of the planet.

“Without photosynthesis we wouldn’t have food for the planet, we wouldn’t have fuel, we wouldn’t have fossil fuel even, because it’s all related to the fact that plants can trap the sun’s energy and transform it,” Harvey says.

Working in a workshop on Addison Rd, Marrickville, the artists are experimenting with native grass seeds, the kangaroo paw and curly Mitchell grass, ahead of planting next week.

“Grasses are arguably the most successful flowering plants on the surface of the earth,” notes Ackroyd.

“Rice is part of the grass family, barley, wheat and corn. Our science colleagues will say, ‘Well, it’s a battle between the trees and the grasses and the grasses are winning out because our diet is so heavily grass plant based’. And yet seagrasses in the ocean, which have been traumatised, ripped out and damaged, per square hectare will absorb way more carbon dioxide than areas of the Amazon forest. The old prairie lands of central Midwest America are phenomenal carbon sinks. Here in Australia there were phenomenal grasslands when settlers arrived.”

Harvey said the portraits would be dried and exhibited in low light to hold the visibility of image as long as possible, yet the work addresses an ongoing state of loss.

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Moored in the Grand Court of the Art Gallery of NSW will be a canoe handcrafted by Barkandji elder Badger Bates using time-honoured cultural practices. Bates will also present a wallpaper work in the entrance of the Art Gallery depicting the fish kills of Lake Menindee.

“The canoe you will see here at the gallery is the first canoe that had been floated in the Barka [Darling] River for 70 years and that last canoe that was floated there was his brother’s,” says curatorial member Paschal Daantos Berry and the art gallery’s head of learning. “So he tells this really compelling story about this very complex history we have. ”

The Biennale will also posthumously present Naziha Mestaoui’s One Beat, One Tree, where audiences plant a virtual tree that can be encouraged to grow by the visitor’s body movements. For every tree that virtually blooms the Biennale is pledging to plant a tree in real life.