Living Histories by
Nikesha Breeze
[Biennale of Sydney 2026]
May 12, 2026
1. WHO IS NIKESHA BREEZE?
“Nikesha Breeze is an international artist working across a diverse range of media, including oil painting, clay and bronze sculpture, installation, performance art, and film.
Grounded in a global African diasporic and Afro-Futurist perspective, her layered, immersive works draw on African diasporic research, reclamation, and memorial, forging otherworldly spaces rich with storytelling and historical education.
Her practice employs multiple materials and methodologies that call upon ancestral memory and archival resurrection to revive stories long erased from the global narrative, engaging directly with themes of grief, sanctuary, power and presence, visibility, and erasure.”
READ MORE – About Nikesha Breeze
2. WHAT IS “LIVING HISTORIES”?
“…a monumental immersive installation premiering at the 25th Biennale of Sydney (March 14 – June 14, 2026), curated by Hoor Al-Qasimiand sited within the turbine hall of the historic White Bay Power Station.
Drawing from the 1930s Federal Writers Project “Born into Slavery,“, an oral history archive of over 2,500 first-hand accounts from formerly enslaved African American elders, the work reanimates these voices through a towering Baobab-inspired textile tree woven from cotton and gauze, a partially deconstructed cabin structure that fragments upward into the industrial architecture of the hall.
Drawing from the 1930s Federal Writers Project “Born into Slavery,“, an oral history archive of over 2,500 first-hand accounts from formerly enslaved African American elders, the work reanimates these voices through a towering Baobab-inspired textile tree woven from cotton and gauze, a partially deconstructed cabin structure that fragments upward into the industrial architecture of the hall.
Visitors move through layered environments of soundscape, archival projection, hand-printed cyanotypes, live performance, and embedded elders’ voices, encountering history not as fixed record but as living, breathing field of memory.“
3. KEY PEOPLE
4. WHAT TO EXPECT, WHERE AND WHEN?
“Living Histories is a two hour durational performance set within a monumental landscape of ancient Baobab-inspired textile trees that hold and transmit the stories of formerly enslaved African American elders.
Performers activate the space through movement, spoken word, poetry, and embodied ritual, guiding audiences into intimate encounters with memory and presence. Archival voices resonate through a sound composition by Lazarus Nance Letcher, inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s 1930s ethnographic recordings. […] As audiences move freely through this shifting world […] . Witnessing becomes a shared act of remembrance.“
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THE STYLANDER GALLERY coming soon.
The Mend