In February 2025, artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino were announced as Australia’s 2026 representatives for the Venice Biennale. A week later the invitation was rescinded to much global coverage and local furore. This was only heightened when Stolon Press’s exhibition, Flat Earth, which included Sabsabi’s work, was indefinitely postponed at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). Both decisions were made under questionable and opaque circumstances. The Venice dismissal followed conservative accusations that Sabsabi had previously valorised terrorism in his artwork with Monash University following suit, citing community well-being concerns. Ensuing outcries against censorship and racism, alongside the threat of an empty Australia pavilion, eventually led to Sabsabi’s reappointment and Flat Earth too was opened to the public. While the protests and discussions surrounding the decisions abated the political, social and cultural conditions that led to these fiascos linger.

This is where this edition of Art + Australia ‘Issue 60.2 The Recurrent’ is situated. In this issue authors and artists look to things that return, persist and linger, like memory, history, the ancestral, or trauma. To do so they make a series of returns to question the ongoing effects of colonisation, forms of memorialisation and affective approaches to place, history and community. We begin the issue on the coast of West Africa with Ibiye Camp’s artistic commission Floating Power Houses and Rémy Mallet’s article We Will Not Forget: How African Artists Confront Post-Colonial Legacies, establishing a particularly oceanic tone.

On Art + Australia’s home page a series of watery surfaces with fragmented reflections of industrial material, bodies in motion and animated fabrics drift across the screen. The imagery, produced through a consideration of advanced scanning techniques including LiDAR and point cloud systems, appears like vignettes of half remembered places and people. Developed by London and Freetown based Ibiye Camp, Floating Power Houses is a new commission for Art + Australia that traces the power ships off the coast of Sierra Leone. As she discusses with colleague and collaborator Rhiarna Dhaliwal in a conversation included in this issue, ‘{she doesn’t} want the work to depict ruins, {she wants} to capture essence and space and how things tie together’. Like the ships that provide power to the region and beyond, Camp’s delicate surfaces speak of precarity, trade and the ephemerality of global economic cycles. Layered further, her imagery secedes from the spectacle of the ship’s presence. Instead, drawing us into aqueous, oil-like surfaces, Floating Power Houses becomes a series of new landscape morphologies that reclaim the coastline from the powers that continue to dictate its possession and exchange.

Rémy Mallet’s article We Will Not Forget looks to four powerful voices from West and Central Africa: Romuald Hazoumè, Tidiane Ndongo, Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe, and Roméo Mivekannin. These artists work ‘with materials marked by violence, migration, and resilience’ as a way to revive cultural memory and confront global inequalities. The artists work in sculpture, print and painting to reconfigure the landscape and traditional styles, intervening in the colonial legacies that had acted to suppress and dispossess. Like Camp’s watery surfaces, the repatriated jerry cans exported from the EU to West Africa in Hazoumè’s work point to the ocean as a site of migration and Imperialist appropriation – by Europeans or beyond.

Both Camp and the artists discussed by Mallet enact a powerful challenge to the persistent recurrence of European dispossession and extraction by evoking their distinctive sense of place and cultural traditions. We see this too in poet Claire G. Coleman’s ekphrastic response to Katie West’s exhibition Rockpools (4 July – 29 August 2025, West Space, Naarm/Melbourne). West’s assemblages of the detritus of colonisation were transformed into a series of crustacean-like rockpools replete with shells that, as Coleman evokes, ‘… recolonise the metallic electronic landscapes’  to tell ‘hydrophonic stories’. ‘Speaking to us’ through ‘song’, Coleman describes the resistance of a ‘recolonised trash colony’ regenerated by shells carrying ‘ancestral memories’.

Landing in Western Australia amid Coleman’s words is where the issue settles for a moment. Articles by Helen Curtis and Sarah Miller contest and explore elements of Boorloo/Perth’s comparably recent cultural heritage and historicization. Helen Curtis looks to public memorials, particularly Paul Ritter’s Ore Obelisk, which was quietly removed from its pedestal by the City of Perth. Curtis explores the layers that accrue around civic monuments and memorials and how their treatment, editing and mishandling diminishes the public record and sense of place. As Curtis charts, Ritter’s important sculpture was dismantled and replaced by a piece of anonymous ‘space junk’. Curtis reasserts the importance of local art in the public sphere and that inappropriate political or council behaviour can undermine civic history and our sense of place.

Sarah Miller, the previous director of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), responds to Lisa Liebetrau’s article published in Art + Australia in 2024. In her article, Liebetrau looked at the historic Artist Regional Exchange (ARX, ran for five seasons 1987-1999) as an artist-researcher working through archival material in PICA, one of ARX’s many locations. Liebetrau’s article asked questions of the artist-run project in response to the documents and ephemera held in PICA’s holdings. Partial and incomplete, PICA’s archive left many gaps unfilled for Liebetrau, that Miller seeks to elucidate. As someone who was there and is connected to many others who were too, Miller questions Liebetrau’s conclusions, highlighting the deficits of the document archive and the importance of first-hand accounts: The living archives.

A central element that pervades Curtis’s and Miller’s critique is how art and document are mnemonics that accrue memory and history as a social and cultural witness. But what if an artwork or document no longer exist or never did? How do and can these histories be written or remembered? These are perennial questions for ephemeral, conceptual, and performance-based work. They are questions grappled with by Spiros Panigirakis and Helen Hughes who, along with Masato Takasaka and Samantha Comte, discuss their curatorial project 1964, 1969, 1977, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2025 (11 April - 8 June 2025). One of four exhibitions celebrating Gertrude Contemporary’s fortieth birthday, Hughes and Panigirakis’s iteration focussed on the period 1995-2005 marked by time-based and installation practice. Their conversation charts layered curatorial methods that point to the way ephemeral practices can recur in the present.

And here we return to Sabsabi’s rescinded appointment as we questioned, along with the public, the circumstances that led to this. To do so we wanted to go back further, so we invited Venice Biennale historian Stephen Naylor who wrote about Australia’s representation at Venice for Art and Australia in 2003. A sequel of sorts, his new article A Glacier on Steroids looks at the many nationalist, financial, and cultural forces that have dictated Australia’s representation at the oldest contemporary art exhibition of its kind in the world. As Naylor’s article makes evident, the opaque exchanges and agendas that contributed to Sabsabi’s rescinded appointment have shaped Australia’s representation since first presenting in 1954.

There are several other recurrences in the issue whether it is Mikala Tai revisiting the ongoing need for Australian artists to travel overseas, or Amy May Stewarts’ much needed discussion of Stolon Press’s exhibitions (Flat Earth, MUMA, Naarm; Live Feed, 1301SW, Dharug Country/Sydney) that were overshadowed by controversy. We too have included two book reviews of recent publications that turn to the forgotten artist Lynne Boyd and the persistent artist John Young, whose practices each challenge how history is imaged and written in their own ways.

In a 24/7 media cycle, it can feel as though issues like those faced by Sabsabi and Stolon Press can recede just as quickly as they came to the fore. Each instance may even feel new to us, even when individuals have followed, been a part of, and witnessed each permutation of the same violence for a very long time. These issues are international in their shapes. As with the reconstructed views of Ibiye Camp’s watery surfaces, we can see like an afterimage how the various forms and forces of the past persist. For them, the only way through is now.