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You and i have had a date with history been standing here
 facing you
for sometime now impatiently waiting to hear you tell me when i can
move I can’t breathe to hear you tell me when i can take 
 the step that
won’t offend the step that won’t threaten you I can’t breathe in one
too many of these instances i have choked always a bête noire refusing
to wait for a deliverance that won’t come
 a deliverance that can’t come
I can’t breathe as the wheel spins and spins and spins I can’t breathe
only to keep spinning and won’t stop until we say we won’t get on the
bus and actually don’t get on the bus
 I can’t breathe too desperate for
spaces where i can live in my own skin where we can breathe in the
castle of our skin I can’t breathe this is why i can’t wait “This stops
today!” Eric Garner said. This is why we can’t we won’t wait too many
have already died continue to die for us to be here
 I can’t breathe as
spirits are under siege and bullets fly we keep waiting for history to
absolve us I can’t breathe so when i tell you i won’t start here because
my ancestors have already been there I can’t breathe when we say we
won’t… can’t start here 
because our ancestors have already been there
you better know that we are on the offense 
 I can’t breathe I can’t
breathe in this battlefield spinning new manifestos for dreamers while
standing on the bodies of our young and the carcasses of our ancestors
ready… to breathe.

This text was previously published in Gina Athena Ulysse, Because When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me, & THE WORLD, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut, 2017. © Gina Athena Ulysse, used by permission.

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May reading group

Join the May reading group hosted by Brook Andrew. This month the reading group will use as a leaping off point Brook’s letter to NIRIN artists in the leadup to the Biennale, as bushfires raged across Australia. Register your interest here

Reading Nirin—Gladys Milroy

A series of short readings by artists who have contributed to the 22nd Biennale of Sydney publication, NIRIN NGAAY. In this session Gladys Milroy reads her story ‘The Black Feather’.

Lucky for Some

Watch Brian Fuata perform at the Biennale of Sydney opening week.

An artist’s book by Stuart Geddes and Trent Walter.
Edited by Jessyca Hutchens, Brook Andrew, Stuart Geddes and Trent Walter.
Commissioned for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney.

The Biennale of Sydney team and authors of this publication acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation; the Boorooberongal people of the Dharug Nation; the Bidiagal, Dharawal and Gamaygal people, on whose ancestral lands and waters NIRIN gathers.

NIRIN is a safe place for people to honour mutual respect and the diversity of expression and thoughts that empower us all.

NIRIN NGAAY is a compilation, a collection, a volume, an Artist Book, a Reader, an artwork, a sprawling, excessive heterogenous space of connections. Published as part of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020), titled NIRIN, A Wiradjuri word meaning ‘edge’, this book is a space where ideas, themes, research, and experiments arising out of NIRIN find places on pages. Traversing many disciplines and forms, encompassing new and previously published works, complete works as well as excerpts and fragments and responses, each piece may ask for new modes of reading and seeing. Instead of disorienting, we see many lines darting and weaving across these works, beautiful moments of syncing and overlap, affective and abstract resonances, moments of density, as well as pauses to breathe deeply. Read and see and touch at random or with resolve – we hope that you will appreciate the way these works unfold and twist together, creating movements of meaning between them. ‘NGAAY’ is a Wiradjuri word meaning ‘see.’ To really see ‘edges’, might also be to sense and feel and trace them, they come into view with clarity, hover in the periphery, or drift away like memories.

Buy the book

Copies of NIRIN NGAAY can be purchased at the
Biennale of Sydney Shop

Book credits

First published in 2020 by the Biennale of Sydney Ltd.

Published with generous support from Aesop and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

This publication is copyright and all rights are reserved. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced or
communicated to the public by any process without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

© Biennale of Sydney Ltd
All texts and artworks © the author or artist.

Published for the exhibition the 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN, 14 March – 8
June 2020.

ISBN: 978-0-9578023-9-1

Biennale of Sydney
Chief Executive Officer: Barbara Moore
Artistic Director: Brook Andrew
Editors: Jessyca Hutchens, Brook Andrew, Stuart Geddes and Trent Walter
Publications team: Sebastian Henry-Jones, Liz Malcolm and Jodie Polutele

Designed, typeset and printed by Stuart Geddes and Trent Walter on a Heidelberg GTO 52. Some sections printed by Printgraphics and Newsprinters.

The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Biennale of Sydney.

Biennale of Sydney Ltd
Level 4
10 Hickson Road
The Rocks NSW 2000
Australia

Film credits

Directed & Edited by
Amy Browne

Camera by
Amy Browne
Jason Heller
Kim Nguyen
Isabella Plaza

Sound by
Ben Coe

Nirin Ngaay