tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/sydney-biennale-8930/articles
Sydney Biennale – The Conversation
2022-03-16T19:26:58Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/177133
2022-03-16T19:26:58Z
2022-03-16T19:26:58Z
‘Rich with wonder’: the 2022 Sydney Biennale finds connection and relevance in troubled times
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452092/original/file-20220315-133415-1i61bn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C6173%2C4093&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Barthélémy Toguo,
The Generous Water Giant, 2022. Courtesy Bandjoun Station & Galerie Lelong & Co. Installation view, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, rīvus, 2022, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Phot ography: Document Photography.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, rīvus.</em></p>
<p>Artists for generations have shown vision and leadership in addressing society’s most wicked problems. Yet art by itself cannot change the world without a platform. International biennales are the most high-profile exhibition platforms of our times. </p>
<p>As the third oldest continuous international biennale, running since 1973, the Biennale of Sydney is one of the most authoritative and influential contemporary art exhibitions in the world.</p>
<p>Working collaboratively with a team of four Sydney-based curators from Arts & Cultural Exchange (ACE), Artspace, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and the Art Gallery of NSW, the artistic director and Colombian curator José Roca has addressed some of the most pressing preoccupations of the day. </p>
<p>Specifically, the current 23rd edition shows how biennales can make a constructive contribution to debates around environmental sustainability and can advocate for a less ecologically combative inhabitation of Earth. </p>
<p>This is not a dry or didactic exhibition: it is rich with wonder, aesthetically captivating and, at times, viscerally immersive.</p>
<h2>Equal status to science and art</h2>
<p>Nyikina Warrwa woman Dr Anne Poelina recently <a href="https://globalwaterforum.org/2021/11/23/australias-rivers-are-ancestral-beings/">co-authored an article</a> about the growing recognition of the legal rights of rivers. </p>
<p>She is featured in one of several similar videos in the Biennale as the personification of the Martuwarra (Fitzroy) River. </p>
<p>The personhood of rivers is a key premise underpinning the entire 2022 Biennale, titled <em>rīvus</em>, or “stream” in Latin. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452096/original/file-20220315-23-1o8glwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452096/original/file-20220315-23-1o8glwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452096/original/file-20220315-23-1o8glwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452096/original/file-20220315-23-1o8glwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452096/original/file-20220315-23-1o8glwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452096/original/file-20220315-23-1o8glwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452096/original/file-20220315-23-1o8glwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452096/original/file-20220315-23-1o8glwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Leeroy New, Balete, 2022 (detail). Courtesy the artist. Installation view, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, rīvus, 2022, Arts and Cultural Exchange.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photography: Document Photography.</span></span>
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<p>At the entrance to each of the exhibition venues, a different river greets the viewer: its cultural significance and ecological woes embodied by a First Nations custodian narrator. It is a deft curatorial device that serves to link the exhibitions across Sydney and establish the equal status this biennale affords art, science, activism, traditional knowledge and bodies of water. </p>
<p>For the <a href="https://theconversation.com/sydney-biennale-review-an-incisive-global-perspective-on-deeper-crises-131203">previous Biennale in 2020</a>, artistic director Brook Andrew made a similar curatorial intervention with his “Powerful Objects” installation at each venue, which served to gently reiterate the exhibition’s postcolonial discourse. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/sydney-biennale-review-an-incisive-global-perspective-on-deeper-crises-131203">Sydney Biennale review: an incisive global perspective on deeper crises</a>
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<p>This is just one element of continuity between the 2020 and 2022 editions; another is the foregrounding of First Nations cultural knowledge. </p>
<p>If biennales are to retain relevance in these difficult times, they must look to curatorial models that accumulate rather than discard strategies and knowledge gained with each edition. </p>
<p>By not wiping the slate entirely clean, the 2022 Biennale of Sydney strengthens messaging from the 2020 edition, key aspects of which were impacted by COVID-19 with closures and cancellations and for that reason also have been taken up by Roca and his team. </p>
<p>This signals a curatorial generosity not usually associated with biennales, more commonly perceived as the playground of individualistic artists and star curators. </p>
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<span class="caption">Badger Bates with Anthony Hayward & David Doyle, Barkandji canoe , 2020; Badger Bates, Mungabuttaka, 2021; Karnka, 2021; Wanna, 2019; Coolamon, 2021; Nulla nulla, 2019. Courtesy Badger Bates, Anthony Hayward and David Doyle. Rear: Rex Greeno, Ningher (Reed canoe), 2020 (detail). Purchased 2021 with funds from Gina Fairfax through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Installation view, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, rīvus, 2022, Art Gallery of New South Wales.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photography: Document Photography</span></span>
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<h2>A legacy of oak trees</h2>
<p>One former biennale legacy project built on in the 2022 edition is Joseph Beuys’ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7000_Oaks">7000 Oaks: City Forestation Instead of City Administration</a>.</p>
<p>In 1982, Beuys – a German artist and environmental activist – launched the project by planting seeds for 7,000 oak trees in Kassel. In 1984, the planting of a single tree was commissioned for that year’s Biennale of Sydney. </p>
<p>Beuys’ work is referenced by two projects at the Art Gallery of NSW. The first is by English artist duo Ackroyd & Harvey, well known internationally for their ongoing tree-planting project <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/beuys-acorns">Beuys’ Acorns</a>, inspired by 7000 Oaks. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452060/original/file-20220315-21-3kjey1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452060/original/file-20220315-21-3kjey1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452060/original/file-20220315-21-3kjey1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452060/original/file-20220315-21-3kjey1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452060/original/file-20220315-21-3kjey1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452060/original/file-20220315-21-3kjey1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452060/original/file-20220315-21-3kjey1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452060/original/file-20220315-21-3kjey1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ackroyd & Harvey, Lille Madden / Tar-Ra (Dawes Point), Gadigal land, Sydney, 2022. Courtesy the artists. Installation view, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, rīvus, 2022, Art Gallery of New South Wales.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photography: Document Photography</span></span>
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<p>For the biennale they have created monumental “living” portraits of environmentalist Lille Madden and her grandfather Uncle Charles “Chicka” Madden. Made in Sydney from a variety of grasses, the commanding portraits are ephemeral like grass itself and will likely fade over time. </p>
<p>The second work connecting back to Beuys is One Beat One Tree. A digital interactive installation by the late Belgian artist Naziha Mestaoui, it invites visitors to “plant” and “grow” a tree with dance-like moves. While these trees grow on the screen, the work also has real-world reforestation outcomes. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452330/original/file-20220315-21-hddxa3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452330/original/file-20220315-21-hddxa3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452330/original/file-20220315-21-hddxa3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452330/original/file-20220315-21-hddxa3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452330/original/file-20220315-21-hddxa3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452330/original/file-20220315-21-hddxa3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452330/original/file-20220315-21-hddxa3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452330/original/file-20220315-21-hddxa3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Naziha Mestaoui’s One Beat, One Tree, 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Felicity Fenner</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>Another response to Beuys’ tree is being performed by artist Mike Parr this week. </p>
<p>The 2022 biennale’s homage to Beuys resuscitates Australia’s iteration of one of the world’s earliest and most iconic environmental artworks, which will be relaunched with the opening of Sydney Modern later this year.</p>
<h2>Flow and connection</h2>
<p>This seamless flow across time, cultures and natural environments epitomises the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, making it is near impossible to single out individual works as highlights. </p>
<p>Those that conjure the concepts of flow and interconnectedness, inherent to bodies of water, most clearly articulate the exhibition premise. There is Bernie Krause’s audio feast titled The Great Animal Orchestra and Cave Urban’s suspended bamboo river at Barangaroo. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452064/original/file-20220315-131677-ncr7u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452064/original/file-20220315-131677-ncr7u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452064/original/file-20220315-131677-ncr7u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452064/original/file-20220315-131677-ncr7u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452064/original/file-20220315-131677-ncr7u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452064/original/file-20220315-131677-ncr7u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452064/original/file-20220315-131677-ncr7u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452064/original/file-20220315-131677-ncr7u1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Left to Right: Nicole Foreshew, YIRUNG BILA (SKY HEAVEN RIVER),2022.
(detail). Courtesy the artist; Cave Urban, Flow, 2022 (detail). Courtesy the artists; Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Fishbone IV, 2019- 2022 (detail). Courtesy the artist & Green Art Gallery, Dubai; and Ana Barboza and Rafael Freyre, Water ecosystem, 2019-2022 (detail). Courtesy the artists & Museode Arte Contemporáneo de Lima. Installation view, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, rīvus, 2022, The Cutaway at Barangaroo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photography: Document Photography.</span></span>
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<p>Leanne Tobin’s film traces the journey of the Burramatta (Parramatta) River eels at ACE. Hannah Tuulikki’s equally hypnotic film depicts the artist singing to and swimming with seals in her native Scotland. </p>
<p>Carolina Caycedo’s expansive wall map of waterways at the National Art School Gallery is matched in its big picture vision by Barthélémy Toguo’s similarly sweeping painting, The Generous Water Giant, at the MCA. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452095/original/file-20220315-24-1917zor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452095/original/file-20220315-24-1917zor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452095/original/file-20220315-24-1917zor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452095/original/file-20220315-24-1917zor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452095/original/file-20220315-24-1917zor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452095/original/file-20220315-24-1917zor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452095/original/file-20220315-24-1917zor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452095/original/file-20220315-24-1917zor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Installation view Ngalawan - We Live, We Remain 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph: Lyndal Irons</span></span>
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<p>The accompanying publication, rīvus: a glossary of water, encapsulates the exhibition’s interdisciplinary approach in a way that, like the exhibition itself, is non-hierarchical and interwoven.</p>
<p>The 2022 Biennale of Sydney invites new audiences through its attention to those international issues also impacting Australia, and in its extensive participation with local artists and communities. </p>
<p>Though still very much part of the international biennale network, this exhibition has all the ingredients to offer Australian visitors inspiration and meaningfulness at a time when art and exhibitions are all too easily overshadowed by the global challenges we face. </p>
<p><em>The 23rd Biennale of Sydney, rīvus, is at various venues until June 13.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/177133/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The author's journal article "De-Beuysed But Not Forgotten: Joseph Beuys in Sydney" (Public Art Dialogue, NY, 2019) appears in the 2022 Biennale of Sydney publication, "rivus: a glossary of water".</span></em></p>
The aesthetically captivating 23rd edition of the biennale shows how art can contribute to debates around environmental sustainability.
Felicity Fenner, Associate Professor at UNSW Art & Design, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/163430
2021-06-29T19:54:26Z
2021-06-29T19:54:26Z
Principles or pragmatism: does it matter where arts sponsorship comes from?
<p>Perth arts organisation ARTRAGE, which runs the annual Fringe World festival, last week announced it had accepted ongoing funding from the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/jun/24/they-are-not-wanted-activists-angry-over-perth-fringe-worlds-new-deal-with-mining-giant">mining company Woodside Petroleum</a>. </p>
<p>Local artists have long protested against Woodside’s position as a naming-rights sponsor of Fringe World. In response, the festival <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/dec/18/perths-fringe-festival-under-fire-for-gag-order-clause-in-artist-contracts">introduced a contract clause</a> artists claimed was an effective “gag order” to prevent them protesting the arrangement.</p>
<p>When that naming-rights partnership ended earlier this month, activists celebrated it as a win. But they now believe it was little more than a symbolic victory.</p>
<p>Speaking about the reworked sponsorship deal, ARTRAGE CEO <a href="https://fringeworld.com.au/news/artrage-woodside-enter-new-partnership">Sharon Burgess said</a>:</p>
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<p>we are excited to be embarking on a new phase of the partnership […] ARTRAGE is not in the business of making political statements or taking a stance on the subject; we will leave that up to our artists. </p>
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<p>From this statement, it seems artists are now welcome to protest about funding arrangements. But this is a no-win situation for the artists. If they participate in an event paid for by the mining company, they are acting as collaborators. If they decline to participate, they do not get to show their work. </p>
<p>This is a much bigger question than one festival and one sponsor. With climate change as an overarching global threat, should arts organisations take money from the companies that are part of the problem? </p>
<h2>Throwing good money after bad?</h2>
<p>Everyone in the arts is always short of money, and corporate sponsorship is often an important part of a company’s income mix. This money allows them to pay artists, reach broader audiences and keep creating new work.</p>
<p>For corporations, arts sponsorship is used to generate positive publicity. Companies want to demonstrate they are generous and socially responsible. Their profile is enhanced by the association.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, fossil fuel companies across the world are keen to support arts and cultural activity. Providing this support, they can appear to be part of the solution, rather than the creator of the problem.</p>
<p>Earlier this month there was a <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/658021/climate-activists-occupy-london-science-museum/">two-day protest</a> at London’s Science Museum against Shell’s sponsorship of an exhibition called Our Future Planet, looking at climate change solutions. The director of the museum, Ian Blatchford, defended the sponsorship, arguing Shell is helping in “finding solutions” through its engagement with the museum. </p>
<p>Similar protests have been held throughout the UK in recent years in relation to cultural support from BP. The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/mar/11/bp-to-end-tate-sponsorship-climate-protests">Tate Museum</a>, the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/oct/02/royal-shakespeare-company-to-end-bp-sponsorship-deal">Royal Shakespeare Company</a> and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/apr/06/bp-ends-34-year-edinburgh-international-festival-sponsorship">Edinburgh Festival</a> have all determined they will no longer accept funding from BP.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-there-any-clean-money-left-to-fund-the-arts-24159">Is there any clean money left to fund the arts?</a>
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<p>The most infamous recent case in Australia remains the 2014 protests against the relationship between the <a href="https://theconversation.com/should-artists-boycott-the-sydney-biennale-over-transfield-links-23067">Sydney Biennale and Transfield</a>. At the time, Transfield was contracted to manage the offshore detention centres in Nauru and Manus Island. </p>
<p>After the protests, the festival broke ties with their sponsor.</p>
<p>In March that year, Malcolm Turnbull (then Minister for Communications) called the artists “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/11/malcolm-turnbull-slams-biennales-vicious-ingratitude-to-transfield">viciously ungrateful</a>”, and George Brandis (then Minister for the Arts) requested the Australia Council <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/sydney-biennale-shame-risks-funding-says-george-brandis/news-story/28d6d9c2d7eeb4d1a3e18b0809fc9a83">craft a policy</a> saying arts organisations could “not unreasonably refuse private sector funding” on political grounds. </p>
<p>Brandis then removed $105 million from the Council in 2015.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/we-should-value-the-biennale-protest-not-threaten-arts-funding-24333">We should value the Biennale protest, not threaten arts funding</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Whose festival is it?</h2>
<p>There are many examples in Australia of arts organisations accepting sponsorship from mining companies.</p>
<p>BHP is the principal sponsor of Tarnanthi at the Art Gallery of South Australia, an important festival of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. Rio Tinto was the principal sponsor of a six-year project with the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Desert River Sea: Kimberley Art Then & Now. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408787/original/file-20210629-23-1njg7yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Tarnanthi information booth" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408787/original/file-20210629-23-1njg7yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408787/original/file-20210629-23-1njg7yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408787/original/file-20210629-23-1njg7yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408787/original/file-20210629-23-1njg7yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408787/original/file-20210629-23-1njg7yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408787/original/file-20210629-23-1njg7yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408787/original/file-20210629-23-1njg7yo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Adelaide arts festival Tarnanthi is sponsored by BHP.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">PeterTea/Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But mining companies have <a href="https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/SOWIP/en/SOWIP_web.pdf">negatively impacted</a> the traditional lands of many First Nations groups around the world, as well as important Indigenous cultural sites, such as the <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-26/rio-tinto-blast-destroys-area-with-ancient-aboriginal-heritage/12286652">destruction of Juukan Gorge last year</a>.</p>
<p>Does sponsoring an Indigenous art exhibition assuage the guilt?</p>
<p>In the face of continued reduction of government contributions to the arts, Australian arts organisations have been under enormous pressure to attract both corporate sponsorship and private donations.</p>
<p>But there are many ethical dilemmas in accepting sponsorship. Being pragmatic — and accepting the money for immediate benefit — may not be wise in the long term. The brand of the arts organisation could from thereon be <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/19/sackler-family-members-face-mass-litigation-criminal-investigations-over-opioids-crisis">associated</a> with the sponsor, which can cause long-term damage to the arts organisation — especially when there is a belief (founded or not) the sponsor can <a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/blight-at-the-museum">compromise the integrity</a> of the arts organisation.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/global-arts-scene-awash-with-big-oil-and-gas-sponsorship-25221">Global arts scene awash with big oil and gas sponsorship</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The size of the sponsorship can also often be <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/02/arts-corporate-sponsorship-tate-british-museum">relatively small</a> in comparison to the overall cost of mounting the event. The price of turning off artists and audiences may be a poor exchange. </p>
<p>Tobacco companies were once, too, big arts sponsors in Australia. When this sponsorship was banned as part of Australia’s anti-smoking campaign, it was replaced with a <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/from-the-archives-1987-victoria-to-ban-tobacco-sponsorship-in-sport-20191002-p52x0s.html">tobacco tax</a> used to buy public health advertising space in programs or on signage of impacted sporting and cultural events.</p>
<p>It is possible to be sympathetic to the conundrum arts organisations find themselves in: mining companies are among the richest in Australia, and are therefore among the most likely to be able to sponsor arts festivals and other arts activity. </p>
<p>Perhaps one should take the money and run, and see it as a fair exchange. But no-one should imagine the gift comes without a price.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163430/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jo Caust has received funding from the Australia Council. She is a member of NAVA and the Arts Industry Council (SA). </span></em></p>
Perth’s Fringe World is being critiqued, again, for accepting sponsorship from Woodside Petroleum.
Jo Caust, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow (Hon), School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/131203
2020-03-16T03:02:33Z
2020-03-16T03:02:33Z
Sydney Biennale review: an incisive global perspective on deeper crises
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320659/original/file-20200316-53543-ug25ij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C0%2C2973%2C1949&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ibrahim Mahama's No Friend but the Mountains (2020). Installation view at Cockatoo Island. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph: Zan Wimberley</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Three days into its programmed three months, at the time of writing the 22nd <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/">Biennale of Sydney</a> is one of the few major public events in the world not to have been entirely closed down in response to the coronavirus pandemic.</p>
<p>Art and exhibitions are often the first to be pushed aside in times of crisis, dismissed as having no relevance to solving the challenges at hand. Indeed, the 2020 Biennale of Sydney does not provide solutions to the world’s current health crisis. It does better than that, offering a visually rich, coherent and global perspective to more deep-rooted problems such as environmental crises, human rights and broadening social inequality.</p>
<p>This Biennale, more than any of the previous 21 editions, is testament to the capacity of art and exhibitions to move beyond reflection to lead dialogue. With a mandate for collaboration, education and new restorative relations with oppressed and marginalised communities, it proves that exhibitions can be not only provocative, but catalysts for change.</p>
<h2>The edge</h2>
<p>Titled NIRIN – <em>edge</em> in Wiradjuri, the language of Artistic Director Brook Andrew’s mother’s people – the Biennale features the work of artists from countries, cultures and identities usually relegated to the periphery. These include an unprecedented number of First Nations and many gay and non-binary artists. </p>
<p>Biennales, of which there are more than 200 internationally, are the world’s most high-profile and well-attended exhibitions of contemporary art. Andrew has taken full advantage of this opportunity and much of the work is documentary in nature, like Andrew’s own artistic practice, which appears throughout in the form of strategically placed Powerful Objects. Its unabashedly scholarly approach is symbolised by Masonite clipboards hooked to the walls in place of formal museum labels.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320662/original/file-20200316-53558-12dg4kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320662/original/file-20200316-53558-12dg4kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320662/original/file-20200316-53558-12dg4kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320662/original/file-20200316-53558-12dg4kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320662/original/file-20200316-53558-12dg4kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320662/original/file-20200316-53558-12dg4kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320662/original/file-20200316-53558-12dg4kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320662/original/file-20200316-53558-12dg4kz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Brothers (The Prodigal Son) by Tony Albert (2020).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph: Zan Wimberley/Biennale of Sydney</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The exhibition is a timely and much needed political discourse that relocates artist’s perspectives from the edge to centre stage. The cavernous turbine hall at Cockatoo Island, for example, is taken over by a monumental installation of jute cocoa bags lining the walls by young Ghanaian artist <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/ibrahim-mahama/">Ibrahim Mahama</a>. Previously commissioned by the 2015 Venice Biennale and 2017 Documenta, Mahama creates physically immersive environments from the vestiges of colonial oppression, deploying them as coverings for architectural bastions of power. Originally intended for the façade of the Art Gallery of NSW, the installation works more successfully here where it can be experienced somatically as visitors walk through the installation and smell its aroma.</p>
<h2>Radical veils</h2>
<p>The veiling of history with symbolic textiles is a recurring theme. Madagascan artist <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/jo%C3%ABl-andrianomearisoa/">Joël Andrianomearisoa</a> has suspended translucent black drapes around the building, altering viewers’ perception of space. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, his veils cover selected artworks in the Grand Courts, where historic European art is housed alongside the gallery’s extensive collection of colonial and early 20th century Australian painting and sculpture. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320653/original/file-20200316-78582-1wnjjoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320653/original/file-20200316-78582-1wnjjoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320653/original/file-20200316-78582-1wnjjoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320653/original/file-20200316-78582-1wnjjoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320653/original/file-20200316-78582-1wnjjoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320653/original/file-20200316-78582-1wnjjoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320653/original/file-20200316-78582-1wnjjoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320653/original/file-20200316-78582-1wnjjoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joël Andrianomearisoa’s There might be no other place in the world as good as where I am going to take you (2020)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid/Biennale of Sydney</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Andrew has interrupted and overlaid Eurocentric historical narratives with the voices of First Nations artists from Australia, New Zealand, Africa and the US. </p>
<p>Works by Maori artist <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/emily-karaka/">Emily Karaka</a>, African <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/mostaff-muchawaya/">Mostaff Muchawaya</a> and Haitian <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/karim-bleus/">Karim Bleus</a> are dispersed among the Glovers, Streetons, von Guérards and Mackennals, offering alternative portrayals of identity and claims to sovereignty. </p>
<p>In this forced confrontation between white history and First Nations’ experience, artists’ voices are amplified. American <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/arthur-jafa/">Arthur Jafa</a>’s White Album, a filmic collage about racial otherness, was a highlight of the 2019 Venice Biennale. It is much more powerful here, placed in conversation with European paintings portraying social concerns of the 19th century.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320654/original/file-20200316-78586-1ievyh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320654/original/file-20200316-78586-1ievyh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320654/original/file-20200316-78586-1ievyh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320654/original/file-20200316-78586-1ievyh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320654/original/file-20200316-78586-1ievyh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320654/original/file-20200316-78586-1ievyh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320654/original/file-20200316-78586-1ievyh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320654/original/file-20200316-78586-1ievyh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Arthur Jafa’s The White Album (2018–19)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Biennale of Sydney</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Shared experience</h2>
<p>Andrew demonstrates that it is artists who are taking the lead in documenting and sharing experiences of hardship. <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/aziz-hazara/">Aziz Hazara</a>’s film installations at the MCA and Campbelltown Arts Centre chronicle the plight of people in war-torn Afghanistan. The palpably traumatic project by Mexican artist <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/teresa-margolles/">Teresa Margolles</a> at the National Art School Gallery immerses viewers in a sensory tribute to victims of gender-based violence in Mexico and Sydney.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320656/original/file-20200316-78552-1egt88r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320656/original/file-20200316-78552-1egt88r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320656/original/file-20200316-78552-1egt88r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320656/original/file-20200316-78552-1egt88r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320656/original/file-20200316-78552-1egt88r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320656/original/file-20200316-78552-1egt88r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320656/original/file-20200316-78552-1egt88r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/320656/original/file-20200316-78552-1egt88r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Teresa Margolles’ Untitled (2020)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Biennale of Sydney/Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At Campbelltown Arts Centre, the galleries have been carefully divided into a series of blackened rooms that physically and symbolically intersect. Even the interstitial spaces are occupied, a curatorial device that speaks to the historic invisibility and occupation in hidden spaces of marginalised peoples.</p>
<p>In nooks and crannies, chequered laundry bags transmit urgent communiques about deprivation in Australian Aboriginal communities. Made by artists at the <a href="https://manyhandsart.com.au/">Iltja Ntjarra (Many Hands) Arts Centre</a> in Alice Springs, they are huddled together on the ground like the homeless in our city centres, seen but not afforded the opportunity to be heard. In contrast, the decades-long work of Gomerai photojournalist <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/artists/barbara-mcgrady/">Barbara McGrady</a> is celebrated in a large and loud film installation that provides a contextual anchor to the surrounding international artists’ works.</p>
<h2>Be quick</h2>
<p>The visual displays of the 2020 Biennale of Sydney may soon be suspended due to the current health pandemic, but the Biennale’s foregrounding of art by First Nations artists and initiation of long-term community projects will be its greatest legacy. </p>
<p>The Dharug community in Western Sydney will lead a series of activations to heal the site of the infamous <a href="http://www.bniproject.com/history/">Blacktown Native Institute</a>, and the Biennale will work closely over the next four years with the <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/">Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies</a> on a national program of cultural renewal.</p>
<p>The 2020 Biennale of Sydney is a formidable project that could not have been achieved by a non-Indigenous person. As an exhibition it will be remembered for the stories it shares, relayed with courage and candour, warmth and sometimes humour, by artists at the coal face of inequality.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/131203/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Felicity Fenner is the curator of 'City Dialogue: public art interventions + the Biennale of Sydney 1970s-2000s', currently on exhibition at Customs House, Sydney.</span></em></p>
The 22nd Biennale of Sydney is testament to the capacity of art and exhibitions to move beyond reflection to lead dialogue, especially at times of crisis and cancellations.
Felicity Fenner, Associate Professor at UNSW Art & Design, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/91491
2018-03-22T19:08:54Z
2018-03-22T19:08:54Z
Friday essay: can art really make a difference?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211103/original/file-20180320-31599-ch32xu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Still from Human Flow, directed by Ai Weiwei</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB/Amazon Studios</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1936 Karl Hofer painted the work that best encapsulates the dilemma of German artists in the first half of the 20th century. <a href="http://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/kassandra/en/popups/popup_094.html">Kassandra</a> is a bleak vision of the prophetess of Ancient Troy, doomed always to foresee the future, and doomed never to be believed. In 2009 it was exhibited in <a href="http://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/kassandra/en/">Kassandra: Visionen des Unheils 1914-1945</a> (Cassandra: Visions of Catastrophe 1914-1945) at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and its message has haunted me since. </p>
<p>The exhibition included some of the best of German art from the 1920s, when many intellectuals, especially those working in the arts, foresaw the extent of the Nazi nightmare that would become the new normal. Some recognised what they were seeing and left the country. The majority experienced the consequences of disbelief. British comedian Peter Cook’s cutting remark on “<a href="http://afflictor.com/2013/12/16/2-things-about-the-debate-about-satire/">those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the second world war</a>” is often quoted as proof that art is a futile commentary in the face of rising tyranny.</p>
<p>And yet artists persist in challenging assumed knowledge in their attempts to awaken the conscience of the world. Artists can become witnesses for the prosecution of the crimes of our times, as well as enabling some viewers to see the world differently.</p>
<h2>The futility of art?</h2>
<p>Before the early 19th century, war was most commonly depicted as a heroic venture, while death was both noble and surprisingly bloodless. Then came Goya with his <a href="https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-works?searchObras=goya%20etchings%20disasters%20of%20war">Disasters of War</a> to show the full horror of what Napoleon inflicted on Spain. The art showed, for the first time, the suffering of individuals in the face of military power. After Goya, war could never be seen as a truly heroic venture.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211116/original/file-20180320-31605-y4181m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211116/original/file-20180320-31605-y4181m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211116/original/file-20180320-31605-y4181m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211116/original/file-20180320-31605-y4181m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211116/original/file-20180320-31605-y4181m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211116/original/file-20180320-31605-y4181m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211116/original/file-20180320-31605-y4181m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211116/original/file-20180320-31605-y4181m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Francisco Goya, Plat 26: One cannot look at this, Disasters of War, 1810s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goya-Guerra_(26).jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A century later Otto Dix, who volunteered for the first world war and was awarded an Iron Cross for his service on the Western Front, was loathed by the Nazis for his 1924 suite of etchings, <a href="https://nga.gov.au/Dix/">Der Krieg</a> (The War). Consciously working in the tradition of Goya, he drew the most intense evocations of the full horrors of his experiences in the muddy bloody trenches where madmen roamed and poppies bloomed from the skulls of the dead. </p>
<p>Dix’s harsh realism was incompatible with any propaganda about death as glory. His 1923 painting, Die Trench (destroyed during the second world war), was immediately condemned by the Nazi Party as art that <a href="https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4280/otto-dix-der-krieg/">“weakens the necessary inner war-readiness of the people”.</a> A Cassandra indeed.</p>
<p>The intensity of Dix’s response to that first terrible conflict of the 20th century has become an inspiration for more recent art about war and its consequences, including that of Ben Quilty and <a href="http://nandahobbs.com/artist/george-gittoes">George Gittoes</a>. Quilty’s
<a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/visit/exhibitions/quilty/portraits">After Afghanistan</a> series, which came from his work as Australia’s official war artist, presents the ongoing trauma of soldiers returned from the ongoing act of military futility. </p>
<p>Both Quilty’s and Gittoes’ art encourages empathy with individuals caught in war, but in no way challenges the policies that lead to violent conflict. The Australian Army still upholds our national tradition of fighting in other people’s military adventures. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211122/original/file-20180320-31596-yga9an.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211122/original/file-20180320-31596-yga9an.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211122/original/file-20180320-31596-yga9an.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211122/original/file-20180320-31596-yga9an.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211122/original/file-20180320-31596-yga9an.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211122/original/file-20180320-31596-yga9an.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211122/original/file-20180320-31596-yga9an.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211122/original/file-20180320-31596-yga9an.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ben Quilty, Captain S, after Afghanistan.
2012, oil on linen, 140 x 190cm</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Australian War Memorial</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The futility of art as a weapon of protest seems to be borne out by that most famous anti-war painting of them all, Picasso’s <a href="http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/guernica">Guernica</a>, painted for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World Fair 1937. On April 26, 1937, German and Italian forces bombed the Basque town of Gernika in support of the Fascist General Franco’s conquest of Spain. Guernica was painted with the full force of raw grief, by an artist who was well aware that he was working in the polemic tradition of Goya and Dix. </p>
<p>Its huge scale, drawn with passionate line and painted with deliberate thin ragged paint in black, white and grey to honour the newsprint that first told the tale, means that even now, over 80 years after it was painted, it still has the capacity to shock. </p>
<p>In 1938, in an effort to raise funds for the Spanish cause, Guernica toured Britain where, in Manchester, it was nailed to the wall of a disused car showroom. Thousands flocked to see it, but to no avail. The British government refused to intervene. In 1939 the victorious Franco gave Spain a Fascist regime that only fully ended with his death in 1975.</p>
<p>In the years after WWII mass reproductions of Guernica with its strong anti-war message hung in schoolrooms around the world. Those who saw it were a part of the generation who saw the United States bomb Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211117/original/file-20180320-31621-s6a9ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211117/original/file-20180320-31621-s6a9ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211117/original/file-20180320-31621-s6a9ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=685&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211117/original/file-20180320-31621-s6a9ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=685&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211117/original/file-20180320-31621-s6a9ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=685&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211117/original/file-20180320-31621-s6a9ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211117/original/file-20180320-31621-s6a9ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211117/original/file-20180320-31621-s6a9ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Picasso’s Guernica on display at the 1937 Paris World Fair.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guernica_all%27Esposizione_Internazionale_di_Parigi_del_1937.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The crisis of our times</h2>
<p>The great crisis of our times, human-caused climate change, has already <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-change-and-drought-a-spark-in-igniting-syrias-civil-war-38275">played a role in wars and famine</a> alongside the usual social and political factors. The effect of these disasters has been a global mass migration of refugees. This diaspora is one of the themes of the current <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/">Biennale of Sydney</a>.</p>
<p>Three of the seven locations at the biennale are dominated by the work of Ai Weiwei, who in recent years has turned from using his iconoclastic aesthetic to expose corruption within China to the global distress of millions. His giant sculpture, Law of the Journey, evokes the many rafts that are beached on the shores of the Mediterranean. Some carry their human cargo to unwelcoming hosts, others foundered on the way. Many drown trying to escape to some kind of future. Ai Weiwei has placed an inflated crowd of anonymous refugees into his giant boat, so that the viewer gets a sense of the enormity of it all.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211124/original/file-20180320-31621-18mxcb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211124/original/file-20180320-31621-18mxcb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211124/original/file-20180320-31621-18mxcb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211124/original/file-20180320-31621-18mxcb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211124/original/file-20180320-31621-18mxcb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211124/original/file-20180320-31621-18mxcb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211124/original/file-20180320-31621-18mxcb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211124/original/file-20180320-31621-18mxcb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ai Weiwei, Law of the Journey, 2017, reinforced PVC with aluminium frame, 3 x 60 x 6m. Prague installation, Courtesy the artist.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph: Ai Weiwei Studio</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While it fits so well in the cavernous space of the Powerhouse on Cockatoo Island, Law of the Journey was originally a site-specific work for the <a href="https://mymodernmet.com/ai-weiwei-law-of-the-journey/">National Gallery of Prague</a> in Czechoslovakia, a country that once sent refugees to the world and now declines to receive them. Around the base of the boat are inscriptions commenting on the attitudes that have led to this international tragedy. They range from Carlos Fuentes’ plea to “recognise yourself in he and she who are not like you and me”, to the Czech literary and political hero Václav Havel. </p>
<p>From 1979 to 1982, when he was in prison, Havel wrote <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/31/books/books-of-the-times-letters-from-havel-in-a-czech-prison-to-his-wife.html">letters</a> to his wife, Olga. Because of the terms of his imprisonment these could not be overtly polemical. Nevertheless he wrote a remarkable commentary on the nature of modern humanity, which was later published. His observation, “The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less,” is appropriately placed here.</p>
<p>There is a sense of ambiguity in what is really a companion piece, located in the intimacy of Artspace. A giant crystal ball rests on a bed of faded life-jackets, discarded on the shores of Lesbos. It implies that the world is at the crossroads. Governments and people must decide which direction to follow in a time of crisis.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ai Weiwei, Crystal Ball, 2017, crystal, life jackets, 100 x 100 x 100cm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Prague installation, Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Art as witness</h2>
<p>Ai Weiwei’s film, <a href="https://www.humanflow.com">Human Flow</a>, presents that crisis in a way that cannot be denied. Its first Australian screening at the Sydney Opera House was a part of the Biennale of Sydney’s opening festivities, but it is now distributed for general release. It is both overwhelming in its impact and deliberately internally contradictory. </p>
<p>There are sweeping beautiful vistas of a tranquil Mediterranean Sea – that then zoom in on a rubber boat overfilled with orange life-jacketed figures, all risking their lives to go to a dream of Europe. As people are helped ashore on the rocky beaches of Lesbos, one passenger tells of boats following and his fear that they will not arrive because of the rocks. So many die at sea. There is terrible beauty in the billowing smoke of the burning oil fields that ISIS left as their legacy in Mosul, and magnificent dust storms filmed in Africa where climatic changes continue to drive many from their lands. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DVZGyTdk_BY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>For Australians, there are echoes of the cruelty of our government in the attitudes and actions of the governments of Macedonia, France, Israel, Hungary and the USA. The film argues that today there are approximately 65 million refugees, most of whom will spend over 20 years without a permanent home. The great humanitarian project of post-WWII Europe, that gave a future for its refugees, has ended with barbed wire, tear gas and drownings at sea. </p>
<p>We are at one of those times in human history where the simplistic answer to a problem only creates disaster. Turning people back at borders or returning them to an unsafe home creates another long march, or more drownings. Creating an army of young men without hope is a recipe for recruitment for ISIS and their successors. People who see a future for themselves and their children are less likely to become suicide bombers. </p>
<p>Human Flow argues that ultimately the responsibility for the problem (and the solution) for refugees lies with those presidents and parliaments who see no need to adapt to the changing world. </p>
<p>This art will not change Australia’s inhuman policies towards asylum seekers. On the night of the Sydney Opera House premiere, Ben Quilty asked Ai Weiwei if he felt that his film might make a difference. His answer was: “For a very short moment, maybe.” </p>
<p>The ultimate value of Human Flow is as a witness statement if ever governments are called to account for their folly. Ai Weiwei has gathered material to show a mass audience that he has the evidence to convict our times of gross neglect of humanity. He is a modern Cassandra, telling truth to power through art. The powerful then admire his art’s aesthetic qualities while placing it in the official art collections of all those countries that prefer not to see what he is trying to say.</p>
<h2>Cultural bridges</h2>
<p>Other artists in the biennale take a slightly different and perhaps more subtle approach. Tiffany Chung, who left Vietnam as a refugee in the great exodus of the 1970s, is also exhibiting at Artspace. Her meticulous embroidery of a map of the world charts the routes of the boat people from Vietnam and Cambodia, while accompanying documentation shows how they were received with the same level of suspicion that greets today’s refugees. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tiffany Chung, reconstructing an exodus history: boat trajectories, ports of first asylum and resettlement countries, 2017, embroidery on fabric, 140 x 350cm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Chung’s current homes in both the US and Vietnam are a reminder that those countries that do open their hearts to refugees can benefit from their presence, and that, in time, many conflicts end in reconciliation. It is asking too much of art to expect it to change government policies or human destiny, because the experience of seeing art is so individual. It is possible that art can change people’s attitudes to life, but this is more likely to happen on an individual basis. </p>
<p>In a large tin shed, high on Cockatoo Island, <a href="http://www.milanigallery.com.au/artist/khaled-sabsabi">Khaled Sabsabi’s</a> installation Bring the Silence continues a trajectory he began long ago – honouring the creative tradition of Sufism and using it as a pathway between cultures. Even before entering the shed, the visitor notices the enticing perfume of rose petals. Inside the dark, the luscious smell is almost overwhelming, while the floor is covered with carpets sourced from that home of all that is good in Middle Eastern shopping, Auburn in Sydney’s western suburbs. The viewer is surrounded by the softened chatter of street noise while being seduced by the intensity of colour from the giant suspended screens and the smell of roses. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211121/original/file-20180320-31599-m8d8x7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211121/original/file-20180320-31599-m8d8x7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211121/original/file-20180320-31599-m8d8x7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211121/original/file-20180320-31599-m8d8x7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211121/original/file-20180320-31599-m8d8x7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211121/original/file-20180320-31599-m8d8x7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211121/original/file-20180320-31599-m8d8x7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/211121/original/file-20180320-31599-m8d8x7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Khaled Sabsabi, Bring the Silence, 2018 (video still), five-channel HD video installation with audio, infinite loop.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bring the Silence is an eight-channel video with each screen showing a different view of a Delhi tomb, the shrine of the great Sufi saint, Muhammad Nizamuddin Auliya. Some men are casting rose petals and brightly coloured silk cloths onto the mound that contains his body, while others pray. Women and unbelievers are not allowed in this sacred space; Sabsabi had to ask special permission to film. Muhammad Nizamuddin Auliya was one of the most generous of medieval saints who saw that a love of God led to a love of humanity, and spiritual devotion combined with kindness.</p>
<p>Sabsabi has spent many years exploring this most joyous of all Islamic traditions. To those in his home in Sydney’s western suburbs, he shows how art can cross cultural barriers between Muslim and non-Muslim Australians. For non-Muslims he provides a window into an aspect of Islam that is both creative and mystical, as well as more accepting than the image of faith regularly denounced by the shock jocks. </p>
<p>That same visual advocacy is why it is no surprise to find Sabsabi is exhibiting in Adelaide at <a href="https://theconversation.com/waqt-al-tagheer-time-of-change-explores-the-diversity-of-muslim-australian-identities-91916">Waqt al-tagheer: Time of change</a>. The artists, who call themselves <a href="https://eleven-collective.com">eleven</a>, represent the diversity of Islamic Australia as they challenge stereotypes through the variety of their art. Their exhibition strategy is modelled on that of the very successful Aboriginal collective <a href="https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/3359/learning-to-be-proppa-aboriginal-artists-collecti/">ProppaNOW</a>, which for the past 15 years has collaborated to project the concerns and art of urban Aboriginal people. Their subsequent success as artists has been both individual and collective. Just as importantly they have overseen a shift in attitudes as to what an Aboriginal person may be.</p>
<p>Transformation through art is not just about objects. In Tasmania, David Walsh’s eccentric creation of <a href="https://mona.net.au/">MONA</a> has been credited as the most important element in the revival of that state’s fortunes. It is not the only reason – green islands in temperate climates are increasingly attractive as the world warms – but even the most cynical will admit the <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/february/1366597433/richard-flanagan/gambler">changes</a> he has wrought through art. </p>
<p>The changes art and its practitioners make are not instant. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton will not reverse his attitude to refugees as a result of seeing Human Flow. But he is not necessarily the target audience. Ai Weiwei has written: “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/15/ai-weiwei-china-state-on-trial">Art is a social practice that helps people to locate their truth</a>.” Maybe that is all we can ask of it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91491/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joanna Mendelssohn has received funding from the Australian Research Council for Design and Art of Australia on Line and for a Linkage Project on Australian Art Exhibitions. </span></em></p>
Artists have long tackled global issues, from war to human rights. While Picasso’s celebrated Guernica may not have stopped the Spanish Civil War (or any war), art still holds value, as witness and as truth teller.
Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Associate Professor, Art & Design: UNSW Australia. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/93472
2018-03-16T03:54:24Z
2018-03-16T03:54:24Z
Sydney Biennale modestly comes of age with moments of curatorial brilliance
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210701/original/file-20180316-104676-1xqq3fu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ai Weiwei, Law of the Journey, 2017, reinforced PVC with aluminium frame, 3 x 60 x 6m. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Ai Weiwei Studio</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If a 21st birthday “coming of age” observance can be applied to cultural events, 2018 marks the launch into adulthood of the Biennale of Sydney. In some ways Sydney’s biennale was a precocious child, turning its back during infancy on mainstream Eurocentric art in favour of exploring its local geographic region, early on including substantial works from Australasian artists.</p>
<p>In other aspects it has failed to move with the times: despite the burgeoning since the 1990s of Indigenous and Asian art in Australia, this year’s 21st edition, incredibly, is the first to be wholly directed by a curator of non-Western heritage, Japanese curator Mami Kataoka.</p>
<p>Having taken 45 years to reach 21, however, the definition of “Western” has become almost meaningless in the context of a globalised art world oiled by data sharing and populated with itinerant artists and curators hopping around the globe between studio residencies and biennales. We can be everywhere, all the time. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210703/original/file-20180316-104659-4l1veh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210703/original/file-20180316-104659-4l1veh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210703/original/file-20180316-104659-4l1veh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210703/original/file-20180316-104659-4l1veh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210703/original/file-20180316-104659-4l1veh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210703/original/file-20180316-104659-4l1veh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210703/original/file-20180316-104659-4l1veh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210703/original/file-20180316-104659-4l1veh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Laurent Grasso, Untitled, 2018 (video still), HD video, created in consultation with Otto Jungarrayi Sims, chairman, Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation, Yuendumu, with support from Cecilia Alfonso, manager, Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation, Yuendumu.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Copyright © Laurent Grasso / ADAGP, Paris 2018.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is a very different cultural environment to when Italian immigrant Franco Belgiorno-Nettis came up with the idea, and had the means, to stage a biennale in his new home of Sydney, which he recognised was crying out for an injection of foreign culture. The inspiration of course was the Venice Biennale. The world’s oldest and still most prestigious art exhibition began in 1895 and, some believe, was the inspiration for the launch of the modern Olympic Games the following year. </p>
<p>Sao Paulo followed with a biennale in the early 1950s, then Sydney joined the party in 1973. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that biennales were suddenly everywhere. Today there are over 100 biennales and triennales internationally, though most are only 10 or 20 years old – mere primary schoolers in biennale “dog” years.</p>
<p>A full two decades before Queensland Art Gallery initiated the Asia Pacific Triennial (1993), the first Sydney Biennale in 1973 drew half of its content from artists in Asia, none of whom had ever exhibited in Australia. The regional focus was continued in the following edition, while the third biennale in 1979 is now considered ground-breaking as the first art exhibition anywhere in the world to present Aboriginal culture in the context of contemporary art.</p>
<p>Given these prescient curatorial manoeuvres in the early days, it is astonishing that the board of the Sydney Biennale has never before entrusted the exhibition to an Asian or Indigenous Australian curator. Leading Asian and Aboriginal curators have served as curatorial advisors to biennale directors for over 40 years, and visionary curatorial decisions have been taken on the basis of that advice, but the responsibility (and credit) has always been carried on Caucasian shoulders. This can be partially attributed to the fact that long after we became a globalised society, cultural cringe persisted in the Australian art world, which despite proactive measures to promote itself on the global stage still remains a very small fish internationally.</p>
<p>As the third biennale to join the ranks of adulthood, after Venice and Sao Paulo, what can the 2018 Sydney Biennale contribute to the field of international art and exhibitions? Mami Kataoka oversees a modest 21st birthday celebration, with fewer artists and venues than recent editions. Whatever is lost in quantity is made up for in quality, with enough stand-out works to make for a memorable exhibition punctuated by moments of curatorial brilliance.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210704/original/file-20180316-104639-a6ttf1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210704/original/file-20180316-104639-a6ttf1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210704/original/file-20180316-104639-a6ttf1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210704/original/file-20180316-104639-a6ttf1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210704/original/file-20180316-104639-a6ttf1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210704/original/file-20180316-104639-a6ttf1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210704/original/file-20180316-104639-a6ttf1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210704/original/file-20180316-104639-a6ttf1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Tjungurrayi, Untitled, 2008, acrylic on linen, 244 x 183cm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy the artist; Utopia Art Sydney; and Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs. Photograph: Felicity Brading</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Kataoka’s skill as a curator is especially evident at Carriageworks, where her concept of superposition, drawn from quantum mechanics, is clearly articulated in art installations from very different parts of the world conversing fluently through shared themes of earthly transcendence. </p>
<p>A haunting video by Laurent Grasso, filmed with hyperspectral cameras and drones at Yuendumu in Central Australia, attempts to portray unseen forces in the landscape. Working in consultation with local Walpiri art-workers, the French-born Grasso renders a metaphysical desert landscape inhabited by floating spheres and other imagined phenomena. Wanting to avoid accusations of artistic arrogance or cultural appropriation, it is unlikely that a non-Indigenous Australian artist would proffer such a visualisation of numinosity in a quest to understand an essentially Indigenous spiritual connection to the land. </p>
<p>Sometimes it is the outsider who has the insight and assumes the authority to investigate alternative perspectives, yet Kataoka also invites views from the inside. Fifteen of 70 artists in the exhibition are from Australia, including many Indigenous artists. Adjacent to Grasso’s film is a new suite of paintings by senior Western Desert artist George Tjungurrayi. The paintings are installed both horizontally and vertically, offering two equally mesmerising perspectives of the land he depicts.</p>
<p>In science, superposition essentially refers to the presence of different forces in the universe reacting and impacting upon each other. When applied to an art exhibition, it could be interpreted as the co-existence and confluence of different understandings and points of view. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210709/original/file-20180316-104673-1s0zifz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210709/original/file-20180316-104673-1s0zifz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210709/original/file-20180316-104673-1s0zifz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210709/original/file-20180316-104673-1s0zifz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210709/original/file-20180316-104673-1s0zifz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210709/original/file-20180316-104673-1s0zifz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210709/original/file-20180316-104673-1s0zifz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210709/original/file-20180316-104673-1s0zifz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Semiconductor, Earthworks, 2016, five-channel computer-generated animation with four-channel surround sound, 11:20 mins. Installation view (2016) at SónarPLANTA, Barcelona.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by SónarPLANTA. Produced by Advanced Music. Photograph: Semiconductor</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While Semiconductor’s ambitious animation of seismic data is visually and aurally dominant, quieter works in this biennale sometimes better illustrate the curatorial concept. An example is Chen Shaoxiong’s The Views, also at Carriageworks. Projected onto large screens, the artist’s Chinese ink drawings of views from hospital windows were made as he lay dying in 2016. Like the experience of illness itself, these are slow-release images with flickering moments of animation rewarding the most patient of viewers.</p>
<p>Appropriately, Kataoka’s biennale makes a successful case for the strength of Asian art. Hong Kong’s Samson Young continues the theme of making visible the invisible at the Art Gallery of NSW. Young’s sound installation features a muted video of an orchestra playing Tchaikovsky’s 5th and in the foreground a collection of floor-based speakers emanating ambient sounds from the orchestra. While the work is a metaphor for “hearing” the other – the unspoken and overlooked – in its demand that the audience focus not on the contrived sound of the orchestra but on the ambient sounds of everyday, it recalls <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4">John Cage’s 4’33"</a>.</p>
<p>The imperative of a biennale is to capture the spirit of the times. Biennales might succeed as blockbuster crowd-pleasing exhibitions, yet their purpose is not to present a definitive survey exhibition, but to offer a window into the here and now. Without the benefit of hindsight, the curator of a biennale takes on an inherently risky brief.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210710/original/file-20180316-104645-1wxbc1o.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210710/original/file-20180316-104645-1wxbc1o.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210710/original/file-20180316-104645-1wxbc1o.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210710/original/file-20180316-104645-1wxbc1o.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210710/original/file-20180316-104645-1wxbc1o.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210710/original/file-20180316-104645-1wxbc1o.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210710/original/file-20180316-104645-1wxbc1o.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210710/original/file-20180316-104645-1wxbc1o.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chen Shaoxiong, The Views, 2016, four-channel video installation, 2.5 x 3m. Installation view (2016) at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy Pékin Fine Arts, Beijing. Collection of Luo Qingmin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>According to the late Nick Waterlow, curator of three Sydney Biennales, a good curator must have “the ability to be uncertain”. His point was that curators bring works into dialogue with each other and we can never be certain what the outcome of that dialogue might be. But the exhibition must facilitate the co-existence in the same space of different viewpoints and understandings.</p>
<p>While this approach echoes the 2018 theme of superposition, unfortunately for Mami Kataoka the risk of staging dialogues with an uncertain outcome did not pay off in her much-hyped, sold-out discussion with Ai Weiwei at Sydney Opera House. Rather than providing the artist with a platform from which to speak about his recent experiences with refugees in Europe, and to expound upon his philosophical and activist-driven art practice, the questions kept turning back to the biennale itself, with even Ai Weiwei declaring the conversation “boring”.</p>
<p>While Ai Weiwei arguably has more to say about the state of the world than any other living artist, the most successful forum for doing so is not, it turns out, in conversation, but through his art. At Cockatoo Island, his oversized black lifeboat packed with more than 300 giants is a bold if pessimistic statement that embodies the scale and tragedy of the refugee crisis. </p>
<p>Weiwei’s film Human Flow premiered after the disappointing opera house interview and, though not officially part of the biennale, is a tour de force. Next to the lifeboat on Cockatoo Island, production snippets and stills from the film introduce the people and the stories that inspired the artist into action. In his fearless, insightful and deeply empathic portrayal of the biggest crisis challenging the modern world, Ai Weiwei does, after all, have the last word.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>The <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/">Sydney Biennale</a> continues until June 11 2018.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93472/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Felicity Fenner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The 21st Sydney Biennale is the first to be directed by a curator of non-Western heritage. While the number of artists is modest, lost quantity is made up by quality.
Felicity Fenner, Associate Professor at UNSW Art & Design, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/56417
2016-03-17T03:47:34Z
2016-03-17T03:47:34Z
A surprising spectacle rescues the Sydney Biennale from irrelevance
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115357/original/image-20160316-30227-10enme5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sydney Biennale has recovered from the missteps of 2014. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lee Mingwei, Guernica in Sand. Image courtesy of JUT Museum and Sydney Biennale.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The 19th Biennale of Sydney in 2014 was <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-biennale-transfield-and-the-value-of-boycott-24155">a disappointment that bordered on disaster</a>. </p>
<p>Five of the selected artists boycotted the event because one of the major sponsors, Transfield Holdings, had a stake in a company operating the Manus Island detention centre. The Arts Minister, George Brandis, threatened to punish the Australia Council for supporting the Biennale and, perhaps most importantly, the show itself was incoherent with few memorable highlights. </p>
<p>This was a historic low point for the biennale since its inauguration in 1973, when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam had fanned the flames of enthusiasm for the arts.</p>
<p>However, it survived and the 20th Biennale of Sydney, with its curious title – <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/20bos/2016/02/18/20th-biennale-of-sydney-catalogue-the-future-is-already-here-its-just-not-evenly-distributed/">The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed</a> - has just opened. </p>
<p>The German-trained, London-based artistic director, Stephanie Rosenthal, has curated an engaging cultural event boasting over 80 artists from 34 countries.
There are six main venues, one minor venue and quite a number of other spaces scattered throughout the city. </p>
<p>Rosenthal’s main concept is that today’s reality is closely interwoven with the virtual world of the internet and much occurs in the “in-between” space, where the virtual and the physical worlds overlap. It is these spaces that are being explored in the biennale.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
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<span class="caption">Lee Bull, Willing To Be Vulnerable.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of the Sydney Biennale.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To organise thematically the vast array of assembled material, Rosenthal has conceived of seven thematic groupings, with porous boundaries, which she has termed “embassies of thought”. </p>
<p>She explains these as “safe places for thinking” and expands on the idea of an embassy as a “state within a state”, where the host country tolerates the presence of a foreign power on its territory. </p>
<p>It is not a particularly satisfactory demarcation and many of the artists could happily co-exist in many, if not in most, of the embassies. The nine in-between spaces, mainly to accommodate artists who could make the most of the disparate locations, are scattered throughout Redfern, Chippendale, Surry Hills, the Royal Botanical Gardens and in the Camperdown Cemetery.</p>
<p>Cockatoo Island, ever since it became a venue for the biennale in 2008, has remained a wondrous surreal playground, where the setting frequently dwarfs the exhibits. This year, it has become an Embassy of the Real, with over 20 artists exhibiting there. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115364/original/image-20160316-30219-15q9q6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115364/original/image-20160316-30219-15q9q6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115364/original/image-20160316-30219-15q9q6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115364/original/image-20160316-30219-15q9q6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115364/original/image-20160316-30219-15q9q6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115364/original/image-20160316-30219-15q9q6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115364/original/image-20160316-30219-15q9q6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115364/original/image-20160316-30219-15q9q6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chiharu Shota.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of Sydney Biennale.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Korean artist, Lee Bul, with her ‘Labyrinth’, presents a large, immersive installation that is impressive for scale, if not for the resolution of detail that one has grown to expect of her work. </p>
<p>The German artist, William Forsythe, in his ‘Nowhere and everywhere at the same time’, is responsible for an intriguing installation where you are encouraged to create your own choreography as you make your path through a long room filled with suspended mobiles. </p>
<p>The Anglo-Indian artist, Bharti Kher, in her ‘Six Women’, presents life-size, plaster casts of six naked New Delhi sex workers, who confront the beholder with disarming honesty. And there is a wonderful mysterious silence in the work of the English artist, Emma McNally, and her study in fine graphite drawing. </p>
<p>The well-known Japanese-born, Berlin-based artist, Chiharu Shiota, has created one of the most evocative pieces of this biennale. It is a long room in the convict precinct converted into a surreal dormitory where an array of beds is enmeshed in a cobweb of black thread. </p>
<p>Meanwhile Xu Zhen, one of the giants in contemporary Chinese conceptual art, plays with the Parthenon frieze. He not only recreates, but repairs it, filling the missing bits with Chinese Buddhist deities to create a hybrid world of startling possibilities.</p>
<p>The most coherent of the displays is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which has been designated as the Embassy of Spirits. You enter the space through Mella Jaarsma’s continuous performance of the Dogwalk, a ritualistic re-enactment of people walking people as dogs with humorous, sexual and racial overtones. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115361/original/image-20160316-30219-b82g2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115361/original/image-20160316-30219-b82g2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115361/original/image-20160316-30219-b82g2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115361/original/image-20160316-30219-b82g2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115361/original/image-20160316-30219-b82g2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115361/original/image-20160316-30219-b82g2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115361/original/image-20160316-30219-b82g2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115361/original/image-20160316-30219-b82g2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mella Jaarsmam, Dogwalk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the artist and Arndt Fine Art Photograph Mie Cornoedus.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There are three highlights at this venue. The first is Filipino artist, Rodel Tapaya and his sprawling seven metre painting ‘Do you have a Rooster, Pedro?’ with its mixture of symbolism and grisly realism. </p>
<p>The second is the Torres Strait Islander, Ken Thaiday Snr., with his distinctive masks and dance machines, while Nyapanyapa Yunupingu’s haunting forest installation marks a refreshing departure from the artists who tediously repeat tried formulas in Yolngu art. </p>
<p>Her very personal treatment of textures, surfaces and markings effectively establishes its own enchanted space.</p>
<p>The Museum of Contermporary Art, in this context termed the Embassy of Translation, is the most disappointing of the major venues. Daniel Boyd’s six new “dot paintings” are a highlight. </p>
<p>The performance of ‘Victory over the Sun’, which may have given birth to Malevich’s Black Square, may be interesting for those who manage to catch it, and the video by the Berlin-based Shahryar Nashat ‘Parade’ are some of the slim pickings at this venue. </p>
<p>The Mortuary Station in Chippendale, appropriately named the Embassy of Transition, is of more interest as an architectural structure, than for the art inside it.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115362/original/image-20160316-30222-l9clxa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115362/original/image-20160316-30222-l9clxa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115362/original/image-20160316-30222-l9clxa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115362/original/image-20160316-30222-l9clxa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115362/original/image-20160316-30222-l9clxa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115362/original/image-20160316-30222-l9clxa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115362/original/image-20160316-30222-l9clxa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115362/original/image-20160316-30222-l9clxa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charwei Tsai.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of Sydney Biennale.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Charwei Tsai has inscribed the text of the Tibetan Bardo onto rounds of incense coils that are allowed to gradually burn down, while the spirit of the deceased prepares to leave this realm.</p>
<p>At the Embassy of Non-Participation, the Artspace at Woolloomooloo, two collaborating English artists, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, create two hard-hitting installations dealing with general questions of power, sexuality and privilege, as well as very specific themes, including the Mumbai massacre; Eton and the making of British prime ministers; sexual terrorism and the Arab Spring. </p>
<p>These are powerful, effective activist pieces that challenge the status quo as well as the role of art.</p>
<p>The vacuous space of the Carriageworks, termed the Embassy of Disappearance, is a major venue for the biennale with more than a score of individual artists and groups of artists participating. It is also a venue in which some of the bigger names in international art are juxtaposed with the work of Australian artists. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115374/original/image-20160317-30219-qil11j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115374/original/image-20160317-30219-qil11j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115374/original/image-20160317-30219-qil11j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115374/original/image-20160317-30219-qil11j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115374/original/image-20160317-30219-qil11j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115374/original/image-20160317-30219-qil11j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115374/original/image-20160317-30219-qil11j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115374/original/image-20160317-30219-qil11j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jamie North Terraforms.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier G.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Taiwanese Chen Chieh-jen presents a massive installation of photographic and video pieces marking the victims of industrialisation. </p>
<p>The Australian artist Jamie North constructs his monumental ‘Terraforms’, in which industrial waste combines with growing Australian native plants. </p>
<p>The ‘Don’t Follow the Wind’ curatorial collective brings to us the “inaccessible” exhibition set up in Fukushima in a nuclear “no-go zone” and Lee Mingwei, once again, reconstructs ‘Guernica in sand’ – although frequently seen, it is an installation that never fails to impress (main image).</p>
<p>I have deliberately focused on the highlights, rather than lamenting the dross, trite, repetitive and juvenile pieces that we have grown to expect in biennale exhibitions of this nature.</p>
<p>The Sydney Biennale has long ceased to be a vanguard show designed to bring to the Australian provincial artistic backwater the latest artistic developments from abroad. </p>
<p>Sweeping thematic constructs that are deemed mandatory for events of this nature are rarely an armature around which to build an exhibition and are more like a smoke signal to indicate intent. </p>
<p>Despite some limitations, the 20th Biennale of Sydney has rescued the biennale from irrelevance and put it back on the agenda of serious art events in Australia. </p>
<p>Although it is an event in part designed to attract and amuse “the masses”, this time it is also likely to surprise people and make them think and question their assumptions about the nature of art.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>The Sydney Biennale runs from March 18 – June 5.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56417/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sasha Grishin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Two years ago, the Sydney Biennale was at a historic low point. But a new, ambitious show puts the event firmly back on the artistic agenda.
Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/29401
2014-07-21T20:22:10Z
2014-07-21T20:22:10Z
Circles of context: giving a work of art its meaning
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/54384/original/9prvrngy-1405917789.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A dance performance at Beijing's Peng Hao theatre. How does context help us make meaning of works like this?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gustavo Thomas</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On the June weekend the Sydney Biennale closed, I arrived in Denmark to speak at a conference where the Greek theatre artist <a href="http://alexandrosmistriotis.wordpress.com/">Alexandros Mistriotis</a> proposed that “art liberates us from meaning”. </p>
<p>A week later in Copenhagen I met a Chinese dentist. Wang Xiang, the founder of China’s first privately-owned dentist chain, the Jin Ri Dentist Clinic, put the profits of his business into the <a href="http://penghaotheatre.com/">Peng Hao Theatre</a> which he built “to fight away fear and the inner poverty of people’s spiritual world”. </p>
<p>The two positions seemed poles apart: how can art liberate us from meaning – at the same time as fill our world with it?</p>
<p>Perhaps part of the answer can be found in the economic contexts in which the two speakers reside. One from a Western country in a heightened state of economic crisis and one from an Asian country in a heightened state of continuous growth. In a state of crisis, art shows us that meaning is a luxury. In a state of growth, art gives meaning to life – earned after the fight for survival has been won.</p>
<h2>Context and meaning</h2>
<p>Whether economic, philosophical, social or cultural, the context in which an artwork is created and the complicity of the artist within that context is intrinsic to its meaning. </p>
<p>A “street artist” is, by definition, determined by the very context in which they create and exhibit: the street.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/54379/original/nv7rfkfw-1405917057.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/54379/original/nv7rfkfw-1405917057.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54379/original/nv7rfkfw-1405917057.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54379/original/nv7rfkfw-1405917057.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54379/original/nv7rfkfw-1405917057.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54379/original/nv7rfkfw-1405917057.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/54379/original/nv7rfkfw-1405917057.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Banksy on the streets of Bristol.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Michael Summers</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The most well-known street artist, <a href="http://banksy.co.uk/">Banksy</a>, utterly apprehended the streets of Bristol. His artwork is intimately connected to that city’s urban, social, legal and architectural contexts which in turn have helped define not only the meaning of his artworks but also his meaning as an artist. </p>
<p>His complicity in the “appreciation of the value” of these contexts adheres his work and artistic identity to that city and the other cities he has used as a canvas.</p>
<p>It makes me wonder: does an artwork ever have meaning in and of itself? Is it possible to separate the meaning of the Mona Lisa from its historical, cultural and exhibition contexts? </p>
<p>What of Banksy’s artworks? The commercial art market would have us believe so, although it’s also true that the “canvasses” on which they are painted – buildings, houses, caravans – have often been sold as part of the art so inseparable are they from their context. </p>
<p>His work on the West Bank Wall depicting two children playing in the rubble and dreaming of a sandy beach on a tropical paradise has a poignancy that resonates because of its specific location and the history and politics it evokes. The context is not just intrinsic to the artwork’s meaning, it is the provider of its meaning.</p>
<p>Matters of context and complicity are just as problematic when viewed through presentation, exhibition and even temporal prisms. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.jnu.ac.in/FacultyStaff/ShowProfile.asp?SendUserName=rhbharucha">Rustom Bharacha</a>’s forensic dismantling of theatre director Peter Brook’s [The Mahabharata](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mahabharata_(1989_film) so implicated Brook in a post-colonial context that his whole oeuvre was re-assessed. </p>
<p>An artistic project that had been lauded as a model of universalist humanism was re-framed as cultural appropriation largely because global economic and cultural dynamics had altered the contexts in which the work was being talked about and presented.</p>
<p>No artist can control the passage of time but these days they tend to be more mindful of cultural and presentation contexts, their complicity in them and how this process attributes meaning to their artworks.</p>
<h2>Art, ethics and boycott</h2>
<p>When academic and teacher Mathew Kiem called for <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/sydney-biennale-boycott">artists to boycott</a> the this year’s Sydney Biennale, 39 participating artists signed an open letter to the Biennale Board protesting the involvement of the event’s primary sponsor, Transfield:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>in Australia’s offshore immigration detention centres on Manus Island and in Nauru.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nine artists boycotted the event.</p>
<p>Those artists were exercising their right not to have their artworks displayed in a context that implicated them in an issue that was not consistent with their own moral or ethical position. Mindful that, through their participation, meanings would be attached to their artwork they would find objectionable – that the internment of people seeking asylum was okay – they resisted their complicity in the cultural equation because for them it did not add up. </p>
<p>By exercising their right not to participate in the Biennale, the artists articulated the circles of context and complicity that pivot around art-making. </p>
<p>These circles brush up against each other, often overlap and, when they do, are central to the making of an artwork’s meaning and, consequently, the making of artists as citizens. It is in these circles that the multiple meanings of an artwork and a society can be found.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/29401/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Pledger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
On the June weekend the Sydney Biennale closed, I arrived in Denmark to speak at a conference where the Greek theatre artist Alexandros Mistriotis proposed that “art liberates us from meaning”. A week…
David Pledger, Independent artist and PhD student, School of Architecture, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/19341
2014-04-07T02:21:39Z
2014-04-07T02:21:39Z
Yingmei Duan and the feminists giving contemporary art a makeover
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44772/original/qknjnbx7-1395807508.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Yingmei Duan is performing Happy Yingmei at this year's Sydney Biennale. It's a sign feminist performance art is thriving.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AGNSW</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Until the end of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-first-look-at-the-19th-biennale-of-sydney-23184">2014 Biennale of Sydney</a> in June, Chinese performance artist <a href="http://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/19bos/artists/duan-yingmei/">Yingmei Duan</a> will live in a small forest built inside the Art Gallery of NSW. </p>
<p>Visitors – as they have since the start of the Biennale – will have the chance to meet Duan and interact with her as she dispenses wishes and prophecies written on small pieces of paper. </p>
<p>And this is only the latest example of renewed interest in performance art that draws on the rich history of feminist art. Indeed, it’s part of a resurgence in performance art that looks a lot like a backlash against the ascendancy of the digital in the 21st century – and like a revitalisation of feminist concerns in contemporary art. </p>
<p>You may have been among the thousands who queued for hours to get a peek of public art project <a href="http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/13rooms/">13 Rooms</a> at Sydney’s Pier 2/3 last year. </p>
<p>13 Rooms featured 13 live acts, many of which re-staged well-known works from the canon of performance art that were first performed decades ago. Free to the public, 13 Rooms was the latest international visual arts event promoted by arts philanthropist <a href="http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/about/john-kaldor">John Kaldor</a>. It proved a resounding success, especially given the reputation of performance art as a “difficult” medium. </p>
<p>Despite the fact two of the main draw-cards, Belgrade-born performance artist <a href="http://www.marinaabramovicinstitute.org/mai/mai/4">Marina Abramovic</a> and American video artist <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=2930">Joan Jonas</a>, pioneered performance and video art driven by feminist concerns in the 1970s, we were not told about the contribution of feminism to the history of these vital contemporary media.</p>
<p>This blindness to feminism’s role in shaping the issues and approaches current in art practice today stretches beyond performance. </p>
<p>Questioning the hierarchies between high art and lowly craft; challenging the boundaries between disciplines; insisting on the centrality of the body and subjective experience in all social formations and ideas; highlighting the importance of social connections and working through community: these are some of the key themes of contemporary art that owe a debt to feminism.</p>
<p>The good news is that, even though institutions may have been failing to acknowledge feminist art practice, it is now well in the sights of a groundswell of Australian artists, writers and curators. Over the last couple of years, as debate about the status of women in Australian society has intensified online and elsewhere, initiatives devoted to re-claiming the tools and insights of feminism for the hard work of producing and analysing critical visual culture have grown rapidly. </p>
<p>In 2010, the artist-run feminist collective and gallery <a href="http://levelari.org/">LEVEL</a> was established in Brisbane, to “level the playing field”. </p>
<p>In 2012, <a href="http://westspace.org.au/calendar/event/a-dinner-party-setting-the-table/">A Dinner Party: setting the table</a>, a collaborative series of events exploring feminist art, got off the ground in Melbourne. That same year, the <a href="http://www.lwgallery.uwa.edu.au/collections/ccwa">Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art</a>, the result of a major private bequest to the University of Western Australia, held its first major exhibition and symposium on the contribution of women artists to Australian life and culture, while the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane exhibited the all-woman show, <a href="http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/past/2012/contemporary_australia_women">Contemporary Australia: Women</a>. </p>
<p>In Sydney, in the same period, The Performance Space staged <a href="http://www.performancespace.com.au/2012/exhibition-sexes/">Sexes</a>, a month-long program of feminist and queer inspired work. </p>
<p>And last year, the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) gallery shone the light on feminist humour, Sydney’s Artspace held a <a href="http://www.artspace.org.au/public_lectures.php?i=32">feminist art symposium</a> and gave its galleries over to a pulsating installation by international feminist troupe <a href="http://www.artspace.org.au/gallery_project.php?i=177">Chicks on Speed</a>. </p>
<p>Kelly Doley collaboratively curated two exhibitions as part of the broader feminist project <a href="http://kellydoley.com/2013/01/03/janis-2013/">Janis</a> (named after the rock goddess). And all this time, artist Elvis Richardson’s <a href="http://www.guerrillagirls.com/">Guerilla Girls</a> inspired <a href="http://countesses.blogspot.com.au/">CoUNTess</a> blog kept track of the statistics that demonstrate the devastating reality of gender inequality in the Australian art-world.</p>
<p>These projects are just the beginning of a long list. </p>
<p>Ranging from exhibitions to symposiums to long-running platforms for collaboration and research, they are instrumental to reclaiming the enormous impact of feminist ideas and practices on the visual arts, and to incubating the most vital contemporary art of the future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/19341/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jacqueline Millner has previously received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts.</span></em></p>
Until the end of the 2014 Biennale of Sydney in June, Chinese performance artist Yingmei Duan will live in a small forest built inside the Art Gallery of NSW. Visitors – as they have since the start of…
Jacqueline Millner, Senior Lecturer in contemporary art, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/24408
2014-04-01T19:48:09Z
2014-04-01T19:48:09Z
Glory be! Inside Deborah Kelly’s No Human Being Is Illegal
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45264/original/3ms7cqky-1396327130.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, one of many collaborators in Deborah Kelly's most recent creation.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">N.E. Skinner</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>You may have heard of <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/19bos/artists/kelly/">Deborah Kelly</a>, the well-known Sydney-based artist with a work in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-first-look-at-the-19th-biennale-of-sydney-23184">2014 Biennale of Sydney</a> entitled No Human Being Is Illegal (In All Our Glory).</p>
<p>The work features a suite of life-size collaged portraits and is the product of Kelly collaborating with about 70 other people. Over the course of six months, collaborators, including me, worked with Kelly – and I would like to offer some reflections on the experience. </p>
<h2>Deborah Kelly’s provocations</h2>
<p>Kelly is both a sensitive and a politically staunch person. She has been making art that upends comfortable notions of white Australia, unpacking gender and media representations and exploring elusive questions of community, for many years.</p>
<p>Kelly works with subtle and subversive provocation. Drawing on the legacies of German Dada (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/09/hannah-hoch-art-punk-whitechapel">Hannah Höch</a>) and American feminists of the 1970s (<a href="http://www.martharosler.net/">Martha Rosler</a>), with the science-fictional utopias of <a href="http://www.ursulakleguin.com/">Ursula K. Le Guin</a>, Deborah is first and foremost a collage artist. A collector and re-combiner of images, she re-presents the world in surprising ways. </p>
<p>The artist has amassed a collection of imagery from opshops, garage sales and libraries, material discarded in the waste streams of history and memory. She has affectionate humour toward unlikely things – strange protozoa in a 1970s science almanac or the long limbs of a 1950s noir comic femme fatale – all grist for the mill. Refreshing as a low-tech art form, in Kelly’s hands collage engages the imagination and destabilises the media universe.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44971/original/tf4tw4x2-1395968720.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44971/original/tf4tw4x2-1395968720.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44971/original/tf4tw4x2-1395968720.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44971/original/tf4tw4x2-1395968720.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44971/original/tf4tw4x2-1395968720.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44971/original/tf4tw4x2-1395968720.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44971/original/tf4tw4x2-1395968720.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Unborn collages.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">N.E. Skinner</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The art of collaboration</h2>
<p>I began contributing to her workshops late last year. </p>
<p>As with other artists working in participatory ways, Kelly’s new project attempts to make the creation of art a more social experience, and the institutions of art more porous civic spaces. </p>
<p>The figure of the Western artist as solitary genius has been thoroughly ingested by most of us. It’s the classic modernist image and the predominant legacy of the 20th century. But there are other legacies worth remembering. The experiments of artists such as <a href="http://allankaprow.com/">Allan Kaprow</a> and <a href="http://www.artistrobertmorris.com/">Robert Morris</a> forged art as an experience to be shared, bringing people into contact with each other in revealing ways. </p>
<p>These artists questioned their isolation, the production of luxury objects, the hermetic domain of art institutions and the separations between art and life.</p>
<h2>On display at the Sydney Biennale</h2>
<p>As mentioned already, No Human Being Is Illegal (In All Our Glory) is a suite of life-size photographic portraits. Twenty people were selected out of 230 volunteers. They have been “collaged” in workshop sessions which will continue throughout the Biennale period.</p>
<p>The workshops are set up with materials primed for hours of freely-given manual labour. We have been coming in two or three times a week to talk, listen, discuss and to “cut and paste”. The atmosphere is always relaxed, focused and creative. </p>
<p>Kelly moves around the workshops in her own way, suggesting rather than directing the flow of activity. She has relinquished most of her control to a democratic process that appears to delight her and everyone else involved.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44973/original/7dwd23dg-1395968861.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44973/original/7dwd23dg-1395968861.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44973/original/7dwd23dg-1395968861.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44973/original/7dwd23dg-1395968861.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=848&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44973/original/7dwd23dg-1395968861.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1065&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44973/original/7dwd23dg-1395968861.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1065&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44973/original/7dwd23dg-1395968861.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1065&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artist Latai Funaki Taumoepeau with her portrait in progress.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">N.E. Skinner</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The workshops are a space of learning and exchange. The brave and sometimes nervous subjects come in to meet and share ideas while their collage-portraits are developed. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.performancespace.com.au/2012/latai-taumoepeau/">Latai Funaki Taumoepeau</a>, a Sydney-based Tongan artist, offered powerful reflections from her Island Exile Workbook, a collation of information about the realities of climate change, particularly the impacts on vulnerable Pacific Island communities, including her relatives in Tonga. </p>
<p>The people of her community are facing a future displaced from their ancestral islands and they are already living with the devastating impacts of king tides, contaminated water tables, degraded reef systems, tsunamis and hurricanes. Latai’s own creative practice gives voice to these communities’ struggle to come to terms with their loss. </p>
<p>It engages with a grieving process she believes is essential in considering the psychological dimensions of climate change.</p>
<h2>Making art through creative exchange</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44974/original/jmht2nft-1395969035.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44974/original/jmht2nft-1395969035.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44974/original/jmht2nft-1395969035.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44974/original/jmht2nft-1395969035.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44974/original/jmht2nft-1395969035.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44974/original/jmht2nft-1395969035.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44974/original/jmht2nft-1395969035.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Deborah Kelly conducting an early workshop.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">N.E. Skinner</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Kelly places political value on participatory process. When I asked her what motivates her to work collaboratively, she told me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To zoom out from this question, I guess I’d have to say it is the atomisation of our era, the fragmentation of communities of interest, that we see played out in, for instance, the brilliant slow-motion destruction of organised labour by the forces of capital. </p>
<p>To zoom in, I’d have to say that the experience of collective genius is absolutely intoxicating to me. I’m keen to reproduce that feeling, and especially to disseminate it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Developing skills in cooperation is not necessarily easy or therapeutic, but in order to be good at it, it needs to be practised, worked like a muscle. You need to be strong but flexible to collaborate, especially where formal structures don’t exist. Providing this kind of opportunity is an artistic gesture toward living and working in more co-operative ways.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44975/original/p5mfhf6t-1395969510.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44975/original/p5mfhf6t-1395969510.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44975/original/p5mfhf6t-1395969510.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44975/original/p5mfhf6t-1395969510.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44975/original/p5mfhf6t-1395969510.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44975/original/p5mfhf6t-1395969510.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44975/original/p5mfhf6t-1395969510.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The work installed at the Art Gallery of NSW.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: N.E. Skinner</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Leading up to the Biennale, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/sydney-biennale-boycott">calls for artists to boycott the event</a> in response to major sponsor Transfield’s contracts on Manus Island led to lively discussion of what our response should be. No-one wanted our work linked to the “anti-refugee” regime – but also, no-one wanted to withdraw. Originally called “In all our glory” the show’s title expanded and conversations now continue about how to use the works to raise funds for useful initiatives, including the Refugee Art Project, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and the KM Wellness Project.</p>
<p>There are many contemporary artists who have become smart cultural workers. It takes a certain kind of charisma and confidence for an artist to engage with the social world as a material of its own. </p>
<p>The space Kelly has created enables us to listen, talk and create, and for our labour to have value in the exchange. It is all relatively modest but powerful in its modesty, banging the drum with collage, provisional democracy, chocolate and conversation.</p>
<p><br>
<em>No Human Being Is Illegal (In All Our Glory) is on display at the Art Gallery of NSW as part of the 2014 Biennale of Sydney until June 9 2014. Details <a href="https://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/19bos/artists/kelly/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/24408/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tania Leimbach does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
You may have heard of Deborah Kelly, the well-known Sydney-based artist with a work in the 2014 Biennale of Sydney entitled No Human Being Is Illegal (In All Our Glory). The work features a suite of life-size…
Tania Leimbach, PhD researcher, University of Technology Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/23067
2014-02-11T19:34:45Z
2014-02-11T19:34:45Z
Should artists boycott the Sydney Biennale over Transfield links?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/41187/original/vhbw69h8-1392073824.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Should artists refuse to work with the Sydney Biennale – whose major sponsor has contracts to operate offshore detention centres?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Caris Bizzaca</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Sydney will host its 19th biennale from March 21. It’s one of the most significant international art events on the local calendar. But questions have arisen over its connection to Australia’s policy of interning asylum seekers who arrive by boat without a visa.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://xborderoperationalmatters.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/sydney-biennale-transfield/http://xborderoperationalmatters.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/sydney-biennale-transfield/">Biennale of Sydney’s major sponsor is Transfield</a>, a company which is also a major contractor involved in running detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island. It recently announced <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/03/construction-company-set-to-take-over-salvos-asylum-seeker-welfare-services">plans</a> to take on more work at these centres.</p>
<p>My own awareness of this connection occurred in the context of my work as a Sydney-based academic and tertiary design educator. </p>
<p>After receiving marketing from the Biennale and a suggestion to take my students to the event I was faced with a clear choice: could I support an event funded by profits of mandatory detention, a policy slammed by the UNHCR as <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-27/unhcr-report-on-nauru/5118588">inhumane</a> and non-compliant with international law? My answer: <a href="http://xborderoperationalmatters.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/art-educators-biennale/">emphatically, no</a>.</p>
<p>The news of Transfield’s involvement in the Biennale has been met with shock, disappointment and disgust, and the call for a boycott is gaining traction, as reported in <a href="http://www.artshub.com.au/news-article/feature/all-arts/sydney-biennale-faces-transfield-boycott-threat-198020">artsHub</a> and <a href="http://www.excerptmagazine.com/blog/the-19th-biennale-of-sydney-their-partner-transfield">Excerpt Magazine</a> recently. Artists and patrons are expressing their intent to boycott on social media, and the Biennale’s Twitter hashtag, <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%2319bos&src=typd">#19BOS</a>, is dominated by the issue.</p>
<p>The Biennale <a href="https://twitter.com/biennalesydney/status/431251979986534402">responded</a> last week on Twitter and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/biennaleofsydney">on Facebook</a>, arguing that a boycott would “deny the legitimate voice of BOS artists”. While Transfield delivers profits to shareholders from its detention centre contracts, it is the people, some of whom are indeed <a href="http://therefugeeartproject.com/home/">artists</a>, detained at Nauru and Manus Island by the Department of Immigration who are truly silenced. The Biennale’s comments have angered refugee advocates. </p>
<p>“Are you insinuating that our voice is illegitimate?” was the <a href="https://twitter.com/riserefugee/status/431413331388141570">response</a> last week to the Biennale from Melbourne-based organisation RISE: Refugees, Survivors & Ex-detainees.</p>
<h2>Protest or boycott?</h2>
<p>On the question of whether protests by artists, rather than a boycott, would generate a more engaged response, we must learn a lesson from 2012. </p>
<p>During the 18th Biennale of Sydney Melbourne artist Van Thanh Rudd made a protest artwork about the treatment of asylum seekers, as did Sydney artist Jacqueline Drinkall.</p>
<p>Drinkall’s work was staged on Cockatoo Island, the Biennale’s main venue, where, with the help of Occupy Sydney participants, she attempted to burn a $20 note in front of a Transfield logo.</p>
<p>Rudd, located in Melbourne, placed hyper-real sculptural representations of <a href="http://vanthanhrudd.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/artwork-in-flames/">detainees in public spaces</a>. This year he is a <a href="http://vanthanhrudd.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/supporting-the-call-to-boycott-the-19th-biennale-of-sydney-2014/">strong supporter</a> of the boycott.</p>
<p>Since 2012, Transfield has increased its involvement in detention centre work. </p>
<p>So, for how long will the arts community accept detention-centre funding for a major event such as the Sydney Biennale?</p>
<h2>The limits of a boycott</h2>
<p>Transfield is an enormous business, involved in many aspects of Australian life, including public transport. Should those calling for a boycott of the Biennale also boycott public transport? </p>
<p>This is a fair question, and speaks to a disturbing fact. The internment-industrial-complex has become so extensive that we are all implicated in it. It is in our superannuation, our trains, our waste management, our art and more. </p>
<p>There is a risk of being immobilised by this totality, an effect, University of Sydney researcher Angela Mitropolous <a href="https://medium.com/p/b71a3868589a">argues</a>, of a system that fosters a constant shifting of risk and blame. </p>
<p>Equally though, Mitropolous suggests that our being implicated is also a source of resistance – provided we choose to rethink our responsibilities and ability to act. In this sense, while I may not be able to give up using public transport, I can resist Transfield through my work in the arts industry, a tactic that social researcher Ann Deslandes has <a href="https://www.newmatilda.com/2014/02/05/lets-down-tools-migrants-and-refugees">suggested</a> may be effective for many more of us.</p>
<p>In making my own decision I weighed the potential sacrifice and risk on my part for boycotting a major arts event against the conditions faced by those <a href="http://serco-story.theglobalmail.org/">in detention</a>, along with the very real prospect of things getting worse. </p>
<p>For me, the choice was clear. There is no way that I, as an academic, educator, and patron of the arts could use my position to support an event funded by profits made from detention centres. </p>
<p>Each of us has a unique position in this. </p>
<p>I feel particularly for those artists who signed up to the Biennale in good faith and are now confronting a difficult choice. Their decision will be influenced by the level of community support the call to step away receives, pointing to the collective nature of the effort to boycott the Biennale. </p>
<p>This is part of a longer project. We need to build new infrastructures of support for each other, ones that do not rely upon the enforced misery of others. We have to start that process somewhere, and for those of us who work in or participate in the arts sector, there appears to be no better time to do that than right now.</p>
<p><br>
<em>Are you an academic or researcher working on arts philanthropy and sponsorship? Would you like to write for The Conversation? Contact the <a href="mailto:paul.dalgarno@theconversation.edu.au">Arts + Culture editor</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/23067/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Kiem does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Sydney will host its 19th biennale from March 21. It’s one of the most significant international art events on the local calendar. But questions have arisen over its connection to Australia’s policy of…
Matthew Kiem, PhD candidate, Lecturer/tutor, Western Sydney University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.