Education programs at the 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, engage with current thinking in contemporary art practice to promote and stimulate a deeper understanding of biennials and the work of artists. Our exhibition programs for Primary and Secondary students cater for all ages and abilities.
See our Workshop offerings for your students at the 25th Biennale of Sydney.
Maximum capacity of 30 students per workshop.
Bookings for workshops and Educator-led tours close seven days prior to the commencement of the event.
Memory of Making
Students will engage in the creation of an experimental, collaborative textile work that that activates ancestral, inherited and intuitive memories that we consciously and unconsciously hold within us.
The textile work will be created through a series of large-scale embroideries/stitched drawings using yarn, string and reused filaments on fly screen mesh.
Primary school students will focus on gestural and intuitive drawing with yarn through large and unconventional stitches.
High school students will also engage with gestural and intuitive drawing whilst also being incited to reflect deeper on their inherited ancestral knowledges and skills.
The workshop will engage students in questions relating to:
Body memory – what do our bodies intuitively remember from our ancestors? What skills and knowledge do we inherently hold onto, how do we activate this memory?
Ancestral memory – how do we identify what has been gifted to us by our ancestors? How do we honour these inherited knowledges?
Image: Intuitive embroidery sample by Nicole Barakat 2025. Photograph: Cameron Stead
Designed by
Bottled Light: Portraits of Place
Students are invited to contribute to a sculptural installation using plastic bottles, found, and natural materials. Each recycled plastic bottle becomes a vessel of memory, a portrait of self and environment. In this workshop, students explore how identity is shaped by place, using natural and reclaimed materials to create a birds-nest like structure using recycled bottles and found natural materials.
This project draws inspiration from Ana Mendieta, whose Silueta Series (1973–1980) used the body and natural materials to explore belonging, memory, and the relationship between self and landscape. Mendieta’s practice shaping her silhouette into earth, sand, or water dissolves the boundary between the human and the natural world.
This project connects closely to Teklehaimanot’s collage practice, which explores identity, place, and belonging through texture and layering. Like Ana Mendieta, he is interested in the spiritual and physical connection between the body and the earth and how materials hold memory and speak of who we are.
In a similar spirit, Bottled Light: Portraits of Place invites participants to embed fragments of their environment into recycled plastic vessels, transforming everyday disposable materials into poetic containers of memory and identity. Both gestures reflect an intimate dialogue with place and an understanding of nature as a living archive of who we are.
Image: Nahom Teklehaimanot, Haggard Faces I ,2024, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 195 cm. Photograph: Eyerusalem Jiregna. Courtesy of the artist & Addis fine art gallery, Addis Ababa.
