17th Biennale of Sydney, what’s on and where
Damian O’Keeffe
Nine car pile-up
The largest contemporary art festival in the country, the Biennale of Sydney, is holding its 17th exhibition this year. Running from May through to August across the city there’s plenty on display for budding artists, art posers and the art curious to enjoy and discuss. Best of all most of it is free.
As this festival’s theme is centred around the beauty of distance Cockatoo Island on Sydney Harbour is the perfect venue. With its history as a prison and shipyard the industrial surrounds provide the appropriate backdrop for uncompromising art. Highlights include China’s Cai Guo-Qiang with an installation of nine cars frozen in mid explosion and Melbourne’s Brook Andrews who’s created a jumping castle for adults.
Back on the mainland and in a more traditional setting the Museum of Contemporary Art (opposite where you catch the free ferry to Cockatoo Island) will feature work from diverse, modern artists whose ideas and images have traversed the globe. The Art Gallery of NSW also gets in on the act with a smaller, but by no means less engaging, exhibition in its Grand Court.
Travelling further along the harbour foreshore Woolloomooloo’s Artspace invites with an intimate gallery. Billed as SuperDeluxe the 12 week program will include experimental music, dance and performance from Australia and Japan. The venue will also host Pechakucha nights – an informal gathering where someone presents 20 slides for 20 seconds. The topic can be anything and it’s open to everyone.
This year the event will revisit its past, returning to the Sydney Opera House where the first Biennale was held in 1973. The work from four artists will complement the building’s iconic architecture. Nearby you can venture into the Royal Botanic Gardens to enjoy some breathing space with an art walk.
Check the Biennale website for full details.
Although you didn’t mention it, I heartily recommend you visit the multi-screen video installation by AES+F, a Moscow Collective showing on Cockatoo Island in a building on the very far side of the island. I was transported, enchanted and blown away by it. I am a jaded oldie . . so it takes a lot. Firstly it is technical perfection and the film content is a strange fusion of a mannered history genre painting, fashion mags and tourist hype. It is like standing in a modern version of a hyper-digitised renaissance painting. Encroyable I say.
Jean Cave of Blackheath in the Blue Mountains
