Dozens of ‘dangerous’ artworks are buried under dirt in Sydney, and visitors will be asked to dig deep
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- Heap opens at Carriageworks on 22-23 August as the centrepiece of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (running until 30 August), featuring 80 works by eight Australian artists buried under 120 tonnes of earth that visitors dig up and then relinquish to a nearby display.
- Sophie Penkethman-Young produced 25 tiles bearing a labour agreement between herself and her 3D printer, capping use at a 38-hour work week and one tile per day as a provocation against treating machines as "an endless source of production."
- Wiradjuri artist Brook Andrew created canisters of medicinal and edible plants from the Americas, the Middle East and Australia — including Lebanese za'atar, Australian murnong (yam daisy), and hallucinogenic Brugmansia — arguing Western framing of these species as "dangerous" is "built around racism, around ignorance."
- Aretha Brown, working with her queer collective Kiss My Art, buried a quilt reimagining the Australian flag through a Gumbaynggirr lens inside a sealed suitcase, framing flag redesign as a "pretty dangerous" question tied to republic and Australia Day debates.
- Festival director Danielle Harvey anchored the digging metaphor in Australian history: "We're a country built on mining and excavating," tying what visitors unearth to how the country values what's interesting or dangerous.
- Tim Silver contributed a human figure cast in hardened dirt (a statement on emotional withdrawal), while Tarryn Gill produced a gold-fabric funerary urn bearing Janus's faces, drawing on Freud's theory of the self as fragments unearthed over time.
Why it matters: The exhibition swaps passive gallery viewing for physical excavation, forcing audiences to literally unearth ideas about machine labor, Indigenous plant knowledge, and national identity. For the eight commissioned artists and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, the format carries political weight in a country "built on mining and excavating" — what gets buried, what gets pulled out, and who values it is the entire argument.
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