THE TWENTY-THIRD Biennale of Sydney seeks to give form to the seemingly unrepresentable: the profound scalar and ontological challenges to human thought precipitated by climate crisis. Titled “rīvus,” Latin for “brook” or “stream,” the exhibition chiefly attempts this act of representation through its emphasis on understanding waterways as individual entities with agency and rights and by honoring Indigenous ways of knowing, according to which rivers are ancestors or living things.

To take aqueous bodies—whether oceanic, estuarine, or amniotic—as a theme with a political edge