SIX NOT TO MISS AT THE 2025 FREMANTLE BIENNALE
Held every two years in the Nyoongar season of Kambarang (November), Fremantle Biennale returns from 13–30 November 2025.
In its fifth edition, the Fremantle Biennale invites you to step into SANCTUARY—a festival-wide exploration of what it means to seek, shape and share spaces of care, resistance and possibility. Artists will transform coastlines, hidden buildings, waterways and city streets into living sites for art, sound, performance and connection. SANCTUARY 25 reimagines what public and personal space can be—calling for new ways to gather, new acts of solidarity, and new visions for the future.
Expect moments of quiet refuge, collective uprising and unexpected transformation. From rituals of healing to bold gestures of disruption, SANCTUARY becomes a testing ground for how we live, listen and move through an ever-shifting world.
Not sure where to start? Take a look at our picks from the jam-packed program.
MANJAREE PRECINCT
Bathers Beach | 13-30 November (Thursday - Sunday)
This year, Manjaree / Bathers Beach will be home to the Biennale's central hub. Stretching from the shoreline to the port, this salt-stained precinct will be transformed into a vibrant cultural and community space. Expect major artworks and installations, live music, workshops, a sea-side sound sauna and an ocean-facing community kitchen. A temporary sanctuary to meet, make, move and reflect, with free art, live music, shared meals and more.
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VESPERS
Bathers Beach | Saturday 29 & Sunday 30 November, 7am
Vespers reunites composer Rachael Dease and sound designer Tim Collins with Perth’s community of couta boat custodians and sailors to create a floating choir, offering a sonic procession shaped by light, weather and water. Live-mixed from the shoreline and from aboard the vessels, it all unfolds in real time. Boats drift downstream at sunrise—at once performers, dancers, and orchestra.
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SOME SOUNDS OF SOME SUMMER
Walyalup Koort | 13-30 November (Thursday - Sunday), 11am-8pm
A sprawling soundscape by Fremantle-based artist Bruno Booth that will turn the city itself into an instrument. Five microphones are discreetly installed across the city tuned to the sounds of the everyday—the wind, port, voices, traffic, and silence. The live audio streams into a central mixing station at the installation’s “epicenter” in Walyalup Koort, where the city’s sounds, as summer awakens, are remixed in real time for all to hear.
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A PREDATORY CHORD
Victoria Hall | 13-30 November (Thursday - Sunday), 11am-8pm
Acclaimed composer Ben Frost pushes the very medium of his practice: the PA system. Loudspeakers — typically hidden — become spatial and sculptural instruments, shaping sound into form. This is more than music, this is a living intelligent system — reactive, physical, and unpredictable.
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POOL OF CONTENT
Old Customs House | 13-30 November (Thursday - Sunday), 11am-8pm
Surreal and deceptively inviting, Pool of Content presents a speculative landscape: a mirrored body of water spills through the heart of this colonial structure, a gesture that echoes the terraforming of Fremantle Harbour and the enduring tension between colonial histories and ecology.
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NEPENTHE (SUMMER PALACE RUINS)
PS Art Space | 13-30 November (Thursday - Sunday), 11am-8pm
Nepenthe is an on-going series of site-specific video game installations by Lawrence Lek, exploring memory, identity and escapism in immersive virtual worlds. Named after the ancient Greek remedy for sorrow, the works unfold in environments of uncanny escapism, set in futures of total automated entertainment. For this iteration, Lek was inspired by the ruined Da Shui Fa waterworks at Beijing’s Old Summer Palace — once considered the pinnacle of classical Chinese garden palace design.
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