Every Heart Sings is an illustrated children’s storybook by artist Patricia Piccinini: ‘a project that talks about nature, family, evolution, care and wonder.’ The book accompanied her gigantic anthropomorphic hot air balloon sculptures Skywhale (2013) and Skywhalepapa (2020) with their pendulous mammary and ascending bond. Whether tethered or soaring in the sky, this couple have an expanded purview, floating above land to reach the heavens. As Piccinini urges us: ‘remember to look up’ to this monumental couple who sway in the wind. In addition, Piccinini’s generous and capacious title evokes the beat of every sentient being, human and non-human reminding us of interspecies confluence. Her title was the poetic overlay for the lost Kathmandu Triennale 2026, and subsequently the name of this current, special issue of Art + Australia.

Combined with the concept of Coexistence, kinship among all beings, peoples, cultures, ecologies, faiths, and thoughts, the Kathmandu Triennale hoped to inspire diverse ways of relating and living, of perceiving and making, both as a society and as individuals engaged in mutual responsibility. Searching for avenues to transcend boundaries and repair a precarious world, Coexistence sought a newfound intimacy amongst us all, a yearning for belonging that speaks to a global ethics of connection and coexistence, care and kinship. Despite being in abeyance, some of the two years of research towards the triennale has been collected in this special issue. Curatorial strands now appear as commissioned texts, interviews and articles. I regard them as equally important but each function in a different way.

Exhibition making is part of a curatorial platform of presentations and can just as easily segue into interviews, commissions, residencies, workshops, editing publications and organising one-time events inside or outside institutions. In his regular column in Flash Art, Hans Ulrich Obrist’s archive of ‘unrealized projects’, he reminds us that curators should ‘just go and listen, really listen to what the artist wants to do, which might not be an exhibition—it might be something totally different. It might be a school, or a campaign, but it might also be to go to another planet.’¹

This issue and reader commence with the cover work Chu-Dor (Water-vajra, 2025) by Himalayan artist, Tenzing Rigdol and his poetic reflections on the metaphorical vibration of language in tantric symbolism and our shared psychic centre.² A painting about meaning, language and conflict, Chu-Dor also highlights how water as the ‘original vibration, the source of language’ may be a basis for rebuilding a fractured human psyche. From here, the issue heads to the Eastern Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, where Dasho Karma Ura guides us through Himalayan cosmologies, which includes ancient folktales, festivals and iconographies. Ura’s The Living Iconographies of the Himalaya denotes a peaceful inclusivity of a living environment with the mandala symbolising Buddhist circular time.

As Ura discusses, the ancient folktale of the four friends of the Himalayas ‘presents a model for community that directly inverts the principles of raw power and short-term dominance’ instead turning to the interconnectedness of all living beings. It’s a model that many artists and curators have adopted as we all seek new ways to work together, form deep relationships based on listening. Curator Mia Maria goes on to take up the mantle of care and interdependence in her articulation of the necessity of coming together in practices from across Southeast Asia, including Jakkai Siributr, Melati Suryodarmo and the Art Labour Collective. Kathryn Weir elaborates on the open curatorial process of the Cosmopolis platform. Beginning in 2017 in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, Cosmopolis’s cycles, alongside Weir’s subsequent projects, emphasise how deep collaborations required for discursive, interdisciplinary methods of working need to centre listening and exchange. Manjiri Dube similarly redefines curatorial modes, collective dialogue and transregional methodologies that are pertinent to South Asia in the context of the art space incubator Khoj in Delhi.

As a curator, I give the same priority to curating a series of talks as I do to an exhibition or a temporary, site-related project, a text or a published conversation. The notion of careful listening, however, is threaded throughout this issue as a foundational principle. Djon Mundine addresses shunning and cancel culture from a First Nations’ perspective whereby bonding rituals confirm relations between people, their society, the environment and the cosmos with listening at the forefront. He furthers pioneering Black feminist, Professor Loretta J. Ross’ ‘Calling In’, whereby productive relationships can be formed with our unlikeliest allies.³ She invites conversation instead of conflict.

As Weir, Maria and Dube highlight, this mode of talking becomes a way to bridge geo-political, social and cultural gaps to create new networks of creative practice. It is a mode that became central to ‘Every Heart Sings’, enunciated in my discussion with biennale comrades John Tain (curator Lahore Biennale, 2024) and Nikhil Chopra (curator Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2025) about ‘thinking together’ to form alliances, co-commissions and share resources. Similarly, Jeremy Eaton has a candid conversation with trans muralist collective Aravani Art Project. Meera Menenzes writes a series of eight dispatches in the lead up to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale to reveal artists’ works in progress and process based practices urging us to consider what happens in the lead up to a biennale event.

Conversing about the seasonal patterns of wetlands and plant stories I have worked with artists Katarina Pirak Sikku, Janelle Evans and KR Sunil about their situated practices related to place. This watery logic of complex ecologies is extended in the ‘mangrove’ and ‘monsoon’ metaphors discussed by Prabhakar Kamble in Metta Pracrutti’s curation of a section of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025). Their work stands in relation to progressive, anti-caste practices turning to a ‘demeanour of friendliness, togetherness, kindness and empathy drawn from the way mangroves interweave their roots to stand together in storms, become hatcheries for fish, shrimps and crab, and clean water polluted by men’.

There are many other contemporary and historical artists who reprise in ‘Every Heart Sings’. Stephanie Siu discusses material as a site for collaboration as she returns to Nell’s repoussé sculpture of a lying woman produced in Kathmandu with Rabindra Shakya. Inspired by the sleeping Vishnu, Nell’s sculpture reminds us that Mother Earth is tired and weary. Conversely, Siu discusses The Milpa Project’s funny and captivating stop motion animations of Tjuntjuntjara Aṉangu stories with puppets rendered in locally found and recycled materials. From the tactile to the aural, sensuality is explored in Kuldeep Patil’s deep analysis of female impersonation in the mellifluous songs of Bal Gandharva, while Edwin Coomasaru expands on the shimmering androgyny and complex gender contructs that surround the work of Sri Lankan photographer Lionel Wendt (1900-44). 

Maybe the words and images in this issue will gleam with hope and healing as we search for counter narratives of togetherness. As such, I am indebted to all the contributors for sharing their precious ideas.