Home Participants 25th Biennale of Sydney (2026) Michiel Dolk & Merilyn Fairskye

Michiel Dolk & Merilyn Fairskye

Foreground - background: Merilyn Fairskye and Michiel Dolk, Person to Person, 2025–26. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body. The artists would like to thank the many Woolloomooloo residents who participated in this work. Courtesy of the artists © Merilyn Fairskye and Michiel Dolk. Ngurrara Artists, Ngurrara Canvas II, 1997. Presentation at the 25th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from the Oranges & Sardines Foundation. Courtesy of the artists and the Ngurrara Canvas Management Group (NCMG) © Ngurrara Artists. Nahom Teklehaimanot, The House Forgets my Name, 2025; No Shore for the Living, No Shore for the Dead, 2025, from the series ‘This is My Silence, You Name the Sound.’ Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy of the artist and Circle Art Gallery © Nahom Teklehaimanot. Installation view, 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, 2026, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Felicity Jenkins.

Merilyn Fairskye and Michiel Dolk are Sydney based artists whose public art collaborations include the now historic Woolloomooloo Mural Project which documented the development of the Green Bans movement, community resistance to urban redevelopment and local identity in the inner city of Sydney in the 1970s and 1980s. Dolk is a Dutch-Australian artist, art historian, educator and activist who has also worked in Zimbabwe and Mozambique as an artist and arts consultant. As an arts educator he has lectured in art history and has researched and published on Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian art. Fairskye’s art practice traces the cultural, political, and scientific webs that connect powerful real events and involves 2D and 3D works encompassing public artwork, digital photo series, video installation and artist film. Her ongoing art project Long Life (2009-) looks at the world through the lens of the post-Cold War nuclear age with a current focus on Australia.

Merilyn Fairskye

Born 1950, Melbourne, Australia Lives and works in Sydney, Australia

Michiel Dolk

Born 1953, The Hague, Netherlands Lives and works in Sydney, Australia

Person to Person 2025–26

single-channel video, sound 71 min

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body
The artists would like to thank the many Woolloomooloo residents who participated in this work

Courtesy of the artists

Post-production: Gregory Ferris Sound design: Linus Ferris Original music: Jack Dawson

In 1980, Sydney-based artists Merilyn Fairskye and Michiel Dolk initiated the Woolloomooloo Mural Project, painting murals on railway pylons in a local reserve to celebrate the suburb’s people and history, a legacy threatened by developers in the 1970s; the murals endure today. In this related site-specific video mural, Person to Person, the artists explore the continuing socio-economic tensions of the Woolloomooloo area.

Framing panoramic views from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Woolloomooloo and Sydney Harbour, the work foregrounds contemporary portraits of residents against a history of homelessness, social housing, and residential development in Sydney’s inner city. Themes explored in the Woolloomooloo Mural Project over 40 years ago – such as social and housing inequality – continue to shape the community today. This video compels us to recognise realities that persist in plain sight, often overlooked.