SYDNEY OPERA

Filmed on location in February 2026 from a CCTV camera atop the White Bay Power Station
Gadigal / Waranne Country

Install View, Turbine Hall, White Bay Power Station, 25th Biennale of Sydney

Soundtrack
Tushar Adhav / Bamboy / Kaali Duniya / Galitch

Featuring

In order of appearance

Douglas “Esky” Cummings
Buildings and Trains

Tammi Gissell
They Didn’t Riot, They Danced

Kathryn Bird
Remembering
Passages from 26 Views of the Starburst World by Ross Gibson

Shivanjani Lal
A Statue for Failing
Passage from Beloved by Toni Morison

Alison Martin
Sandstone, Once Was a River

Brami Jegan
Three Atmospheric Acts

Kush Badhwar
Growing up in Sydney

Shubhangi Singh
Pranks, Prints, Posters, Placards
With passages from How to Make Trouble and Influence People by Ian McIntyre and The Indian Down Under
Facsimiles painted by Victoria Clarke

Kieran Krishnan
Boy in the Gas Mask

Wendy Bacon
Nearly Half a Century Ago

Jooloo Griffiths
Rainbow Crossing

Helen Grace
Archives of our Recent Past

Rohan Chavan
Sign of Urban Renewal

Kush Badhwar
Keep Left

Munasib Hamid
Curfew in the Triangle

Jooloo Griffiths
Joy in the Triangle

Brami Jegan
Complicity

David Watson
Love Speech

Victoria Clarke
More Courage

Alana Hunt
A Housing Question

Jasmine Stephens
Extending Limbs

Kathryn Bird
Haiku from Flooded Canyon by Ross Gibson

Sigrid “Koki” De Silva and Shaina Anand
Kino-Eyes by Dziga Vertov

Iqbal Barkat with Kush Badhwar
Cinephila in the Park

Kalanjay Dhir
Freestyling

Feras Shaheen
Futsal Shoes

Saba Abdi Zaidi
Pas-e-Hijrat / Beyond Migration

Party in the Cul-de-sac
Munasib Hamid, Hasib Mahmud, Randolph Fields, Nyarooni Leth, Nyaluak Leth, Kush Badhwar, Shaina Anand, Simon Rawlins, Baby Alice and Daniel Johnwest

Antony Loewenstein
The Day After

Tammi Gissell
Stone Country Lament

Our Contraband Light
Nyaluak Leth

Let Gaza Live Vigil
Sigrid “Koki” Da Silva
Muslim Collective

Sydney Operators

Production and Direction
Kush Badhwar
Casting and Liaison
Alana Hunt
Production Assistance
Kieran Krishnan
Research
Laura McLean

Camera
Rohan Chavan

Software
Jan Gerber
Zinnia Ambapardiwala

Editing
Shaina Anand
Rohan Chavan

Graphics
Sanjana Ayyapath

Mix Mastering
Venkatesh Iyer

Direction
Shaina Anand

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and Rubaiya Qatar, Qatar Museums Authority

For Rememory
Curated by Hoor Al-Qasimi

Acknowledgements
Denis Beaubois, Joel Sherwood Spring, James Finlay, Bhenji Ra, Miranda Wheen, Vanessa Berry
Tor Larsen, Ankur Badhwar, Georgina Pope, Fredrika Mackenzie, Tom Fenley, Sandra Slade, Gotaro Uematsu, Barbara Moore, Mario Tadic, Daniel Tadic, S2 Event Space, Najeeba Aslam
Neerja Badhwar and Ross Gibson.

Concept Note

Some things you forget. Other things you never do. Places—places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.
—Sethe, in Beloved by Toni Morrison

And if it’s out there, in the world, could it not enter everybody?

Re:memory should be as ubiquitous and 24/7 as CCTV: an awareness, a viscerality and sentience streaming through us, from multiple eyes, collectively being relayed and deployed. And unlike the crime which CCTV pretends it waits to catch—or by deterrent prevent—Re:memory’s reserve is history itself: an archive of world and home, happening and ritual, tongue and soul, yours, mine, ours in some measure. This reserve is distilled, crafted, cross-pollinated and distributed aesthetically, politically and sensibly—beyond the binaries of essentialism and universalism.

In our setting for Sydney Opera, Re:memory has infected everybody. All characters who will appear in this film possess a generative third memory—in which one’s pasts—ancestral, communal, personal and political—are carried in the bodies of others, relayed across time, resonating and ricocheting off Sydney’s natural and built environments.

The word opera, in Italian—used for labour, composition and theatre—is used here to mark the fundamentally collaborative nature of any such production.

We have maintained that films have to be beautiful on the inside as well as the outside. A reworked relationship between footage and finished film; between live transmission and photography; between the patrol function of the CCTV camera and its hacking and commandeering by artists—and, by extension, its relay into the city, its use and its value; the song and dance between subjects, authors and techne; the power and beauty of montage; the bedrocks and touchstones of our practice; and the question of what is to be done for the future of cinema—the Fw:Re:memory—all of this is on the table today, as we set up the control room for Sydney Opera.

SYDNEY OPERA at White Bay Power Station, Sydney Biennale

Part of

SYDNEY OPERA | Screening and Discussion
May 16, 2026
White Bay Power Station, Sydney

With filmmakers and scholars Helen Grace and Iqbal Barkat who also feature in the film.
Helen will introduce the film and Iqbal will lead and moderate the post-screening discussion with CAMP.
2pm to 5pm.
At the Biennale of Sydney.

25th Biennale of Sydney
March 14, 2026 - June 15, 2026
White Bay Power Station, Sydney

SYDNEY OPERA

CCTV, 102 mins

Filmed on location in February 2026 from a CCTV camera atop the White Bay Power Station
Gadigal / Waranne Country



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