‘The National 2021: New Australian Art’ is on until September across three separately curated venues in Sydney: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Carriageworks. It’s the last in a series of three biennial exhibitions presenting the work of artists who were either born in Australia or who currently work here; there has already been a ‘National 2019’ and a ‘National 2017’. This one is inevitably framed by pandemic circumstances that have prohibited most international visitors and isolated artists and audiences, as well as by the drought, fires and floods that have so badly affected the country in the last two years. ‘The National 2021’ takes planetary crisis as its premise, and ‘care’ as one of its main subjects. Indigeneity is central, not just in the choice of artists, but also as a way of thinking differently about the exhibition’s concerns, such as artistic collaboration, social responsibility, relationship to the land, i