The festival shining a light on Fremantle’s hidden corners

Ambling around Fremantle, I’ve walked many times through Whalers Tunnel, an airy walkway carved out of Arthur Head and once used to transport whale oil from the original port at Bathers Beach/Manjaree to the centre of town.

However, I only stopped and really looked at this colonial-era relic — the first underground engineering project in Western Australia — when it was taken over by the Fremantle Biennale with a dazzling piece called Exhalation.

Australian artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey and their Cambodian collaborators Vuth Lyno and Pal Panha inject vivid life into the tunnel by lining the wall with golden sheets (a reference to the Kodjeningara flower of WA’s South West) that flutter in the breeze, creating a shimmer that chimes with the meditative Asian-influenced soundscape.

As you walk through Whalers Tunnel or sit for a moment, you reflect on the peacefulness in spite of the scarring of the landscape and the brutality that motivated its construction.

It is a gentle collision between the violence of the past and the sense of renewal and restoration that leans into this year’s Biennale theme of sanctuary.

Exhalation is both a marvellously symbolic way to enter both the Bathers Beach/Manjaree precinct that is one of this year’s Fremantle Biennale hubs and a magical door into a festival that excites the arts-loving locals and lures thousands of visitors.

On the ocean side of the tunnel is the site for the Biennale’s main music component; the Community Kitchen; and Sound Sauna, a repurposed shipping container in which the willing are lightly broiled to sounds curated by musicians, poets and community leaders. This lesser-traversed corner of Fremantle now feels like the place that would have lured Ulysses off his course.

Another iteration of sanctuary is offered up by Fremantle photographer Duncan Wright in Veil, in which he has converted his late grandfather’s garden shed into a camera obscura, forerunner to photography in which a lens is used to bring into focus the world outside.

Wright’s Welsh-born grandfather was highly regarded landscape painter and academic Gareth Morse, who used the shed as a studio, and whose walls he used as both diary and a journal, etching the aphorism in his native tongue that supplies the show’s subtitle, Heddwch A Tawelu Yma (”peace and quiet here”).

The sight of the late artist’s shed sitting in the middle of the iconic Freo beach is surreal. But once inside you’re enveloped by the comfort of familiar beach images and the place where an artist reflected on his life and the sanctuary he found in Australia.

Keep walking along Bathers Beach and turn toward town, and you will come to the Moores Building and the installation Fifty Thousand Years, Or For As Long As We Remember, in which Sri Lankan-born Raki Nikahetiya invites visitors to tread the earth that literally contains the voices of eight West Australians who reflect on the meaning of home, identity and collective memory.

Nikahetiya’s piece, which invites visitors to put our ears to the red earth, is a timely reminder that the fabric of our world contains the traces of millions of stories of displacement, exile and sanctuary.

Next stop on the Biennale odyssey was Old Customs House on Phillimore Street for a visually striking piece in which Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler contemplate a world in which humans have disappeared, yet life continues to thrive.

In Pool of Content, the Melbourne-based duo have created a work inspired by WA’s pink lakes, which get their gorgeous candy-coloured hue because of the activity of microorganisms. In other words, life continues to flourish in a hyper-saline environment totally inhospitable to humans, which gives us great hope for life on earth, according to the artists.

What gives Pool of Content its luminescent beauty is the light pouring in through the skylight of Old Customs House, one of several under-utilised buildings in Fremantle that the Biennale has re-energised for November, along with the P&O Hotel (which hosts the end-of-festival spectacular Room Service), Victoria Hall (which celebrated composer Ben Frost has filled with dangling speakers) and Whalefall, a drone-elevated revitalisation of the skeletal remains of the shed across from Port Beach.

These activations and reimagining of Freo spaces are a timely reminder that sanctuary — could a theme be more pertinent during a housing crisis? — begins by appreciating what we already have.

The Fremantle Biennale is on until November 30.