More than 40 artists have transformed the abandoned upper floors of Fremantle's historic PO Hotel into a vibrant creative space as part of the Fremantle Biennale's "Room Service" exhibition. The two-day public event, taking place November 29-30, marks a rare opportunity for visitors to explore the weathered beauty of this nearly 150-year-old building that has remained largely empty and inaccessible for decades.
Climbing the creaky, carpeted staircase reveals a world of cinematic beauty featuring tall stained-glass windows, dark timber moldings, and an iron-framed balcony overlooking High Street. First constructed around 1870 and renovated during the gold-rush era, the building served as a bustling hub for dock workers and sailors for nearly a century, housing 31 rooms and a rowdy sailors' bar known as the Cockpit. Despite its prime location on Fremantle's busiest street, this historical landmark has remained largely vacant for decades.
Musician Danielle Caruana, known professionally as Mama Kin, co-curated Room Service with Tom Müller after a group of local artists meeting under the name Culture Club began questioning why such a characterful and centrally located site remained mostly inaccessible. "I don't think people realize how much latent creative output becomes possible when property owners have the will and vision to back a simple idea," Caruana explained. "It activates our greatest asset of all, which is our ideas."
The exhibition became reality when the building's current owners, Nic Trimboli and Adrian Fini – the entrepreneurs behind successful Fremantle hospitality ventures including Little Creatures and Bread in Common – offered the venue for use as part of the biennale. While the pair plan to eventually revive the PO as a functioning hotel, they have temporarily handed the upstairs rooms over to artists for this unique creative endeavor.
Each room in the hotel now houses a different artistic interpretation of the building's complex history. Composer Iain Grandage and cellist Mel Robinson have set up a cello duet performance space in one of the hotel's bathrooms, creating a new interpretation of the 19th-century sailor song "Little Fish." Drawing inspiration from the building's maritime past and the often lonely crew members who once lodged there, Robinson describes their work as capturing "a gut-wrenching kind of loneliness" where "a sailor sings a love song to a fish." Their live performance will be accompanied by prerecorded sounds of waves and water, forming what Robinson calls "an oceanic kind of sound installation."
Whadjuk Balladong and Wilman Noongar artist Zali Morgan has transformed a small room with recycled brown paper awash in watercolors, addressing the heavy colonial history of the site's location. Her work responds to the building's proximity to the Round House, a former colonial prison where many Aboriginal men were held before being sent to a labor camp on Wadjemup (Rottnest Island) during the 19th century. "I couldn't really make work without addressing that history of the site, and the colonial legacy that Fremantle is built on," Morgan explained. Her gestural watercolor marks respond to what she describes as "the heaviness of the site," creating a quiet, hand-painted reckoning with place.
Ellen Broadhurst has filled another room with animated faces drawn from the hotel's past, featuring sailors, nurses, bellboys, and a beloved 19th-century landlady through rotoscoped projections over a large papier-mache head. "This is the ghost of everyone who's ever been in this room," Broadhurst said. "They're all kind of in hell and heaven, in purgatory and in this room at once."
Artist Guy Louden has created "Wet End," a playable climate dystopia jetski game set in a future Fremantle consumed by rising seas. The deliberately "trashy, oversaturated" game features a dolphin declaring "we're totally f***ed" and a sea god responding that "capitalism is cancer." Louden explains that the game's upbeat development language, borrowed from property marketing, reflects society's "split vision" of knowing catastrophe is approaching while still pursuing growth. "It's about complicity," he noted. "You're not outside the problem, you're racing in it."
Architect Nic Brunsdon took a completely different approach, stripping his assigned room back to imagine what existed before the hotel – the trees, soil, and coastal ecology that once shaped this part of Fremantle. Working with a natural-dye researcher, scent artist, sculptor, and furniture maker, he created a quiet sensory refuge featuring marri timber, hand-carved sandstone, bush aromas, and vast rust-colored curtains. The concept, he explained, was to build "a meditative little pause space" that transports visitors to an imagined pre-colonial landscape.
Caruana herself will present a sound-led installation created with filmmaker Luna Laure in one of the bathroom studios. The shower stall will be darkened with a holographic figure flickering inside, accompanied by a looping soundtrack Caruana composed around "the ritual of release." She describes the concept as "this idea of like, rinse, reflect, repeat."
Reflecting on the broader significance of Room Service, Caruana emphasized how empty spaces create "gaps in continuity" and "gaps in an experience of connectivity." She hopes the project will inspire more property owners to recognize the opportunity in inviting artists and creators into unused spaces. "There's an abundance of people being like, can we use your space?" she observed. "And the shift is remarkably simple. It doesn't take much to say yes."
Room Service takes place November 29-30 at the PO Hotel, located at 25 High Street, Fremantle, as part of the Fremantle Biennale. The exhibition represents a unique collaboration between visionary property owners and the creative community, demonstrating how temporarily unused spaces can become catalysts for artistic innovation and community engagement.
