17th Biennale of Sydney – 12th May to 1st Aug, 2010

The 17th Biennale of Sydney is designed to engage audiences with the themes and works presented in the Biennale, the program includes forums, lectures and special events featuring Biennale artists as well as curators, writers and commentators from around the world.

These programs will engage with the issues surrounding art today, explore connections between the visual arts and other art forms, and discuss different aspects of the curatorial concept of the Biennale.

The Biennale of Sydney is Australia’s largest and most exciting contemporary visual arts event. The fourth oldest biennale in the world, the Biennale of Sydney continues to be recognised for showcasing the freshest and most provocative contemporary art from Australia and around the world.

The biennial exhibition is held in Sydney’s leading art venues and public sites, and is renowned for showcasing the freshest and most innovative contemporary art from Australia and around the world.

In the 35 years from 1973 to 2008, the Biennale of Sydney has presented 16 critically acclaimed, popular and large-scale exhibitions – bringing the work of 1355 artists from 82 countries to the city of Sydney. From small beginnings, the Biennale quadrupled in size in less than a decade and progressively reached an important place in Australia’s art calendar. In 2008, attendance soared to over 436,150 visitors.

The Biennale Keynote Address will be delivered by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose site-specific installation Faraday Cage (2010) will premiere in the old Power House on Cockatoo Island. The Address will be presented at the City Recital Hall, Sydney on Thursday, 13 May at 7 pm

The subtitle of the 17th Biennale of Sydney – ‘Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age’ – explores the affirmative power of art in the face of unprecedented threats: conflict, famine, inequity, environmental despoliation and global warming.

Artists’ Talks

Over 50 artists’ talks will take place across all exhibition venues providing first-hand opportunities to hear artists discuss their practice in an intimate and engaging forum.

All events are free. However bookings are essential for selected events. Book online from 3 May here

The major venue of the Biennale, Cockatoo Island will host 120 works by 56 artists. The largest island in Sydney Harbour. A former convict prison and shipyard, it retains many remnants from its past and it has been nominated for World Heritage listing.

A major venue of the Biennale of Sydney since 2000, this year the MCA presents 285 works by 92 International and Australian Artists. The MCA is Australia’s only museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting the work of contemporary artists.

Located on Sydney’s iconic Circular Quay in an architecturally striking building, the MCA presents a dynamic program of exhibitions and events that explores the latest in international and Australian contemporary art. This year, the MCA’s exhibition space has been given over entirely to the Biennale of Sydney.

David Elliott presents a related exhibition on Level 4, titled ‘We Call Them Pirates Out Here’, featuring works from the MCA Collection (including the work of two Biennale artists).

Pier 2/3 was built in the early 1900s and is located in Walsh Bay, Sydney’s historic waterfront. It is also the last wharf in Sydney still in its original state. Since the Biennale of Sydney first used Pier 2/3 in 1986, it has become a major venue.

Here, 11 works are presented by three artists that reflect on its maritime history and touch variously on ideas that relate to ships, islands and trade.

The Sydney Opera House was the venue for the first Biennale of Sydney in 1973, which took place at the time of the building’s opening.A World Heritage Listed architectural icon, the Sydney Opera House is one of the world’s best known performing arts centres. The work of the four artists shown here is consciously in conversation with the Opera House’s architecture as well as with the history of its surrounds.

Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens, located in the heart of the city, offer an abundance of flora and natural life framed by dramatic views of Sydney Harbour. Take the ArtWalk and discover three iconic works on the theme of threatened and threatening nature.

One of Australia’s leading art museums, the Art Gallery of New South Wales is located within beautiful parklands overlooking Sydney Harbour, only 15 minutes walk from the CBD.

Visit on Wednesday evenings until 9 pm for Art After Hours – an entertaining program of celebrity talks, tours, film and music.

Drawing inspiration from the work of Harry Smith, Barnbrook has created a unique identity that communicates the eclectic, multifaceted ideas that inform the concepts behind the Australia’s largest contemporary art festival.

Download the Full Exhibitions guide here

David Elliott the artistic director of the 17th Biennale of Sydney Photo Kate Geraghty

David Elliott the well-travelled English curator of this year’s Biennale of Sydney titled, The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, paid tribute to the extraordinary artists gathered in the reception hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) to celebrate the opening of the exhibition on May 12.

While art was the issue at hand, Elliott became aware of the competition he has for visitor attendance as the sight of the habour glistening under the towering sails of the Opera House momentarily distracted the esteemed curator from promoting the show.

Nonetheless, this year’s biennale is an absolute treat and the public would do well to engage because as Elliot elaborates: “Art has a very different kind of power than what we’re used to. It gives people a chance to really think about the world we live in”.

The city of Sydney’s leading cultural institutions and heritage sites, including the MCA, The Art Gallery of NSW, Artspace, Pier 2 / 3, The Royal Botanic Gardens and Cockatoo Island are now home to a resplendent array of artworks from May 12 – August 1, 2010. 440 works are on display, from curious contraptions, to one-off performance and awe-inspiring installation.

Important to this edition of the biennale is Elliott’s aim to explore the ancient and contemporary knowledge systems of First Nations people. “The indigenous people were the big losers in the process of European Enlightenment,” Elliot says. He is referring to the colonial and imperial project and thus it is fitting that artists from Canada, New Zealand and Australia are all present.

“I wanted to present diverse cultures on the equal playing filed of contemporary art, where no culture can assume superiority over any other,” explains Elliott. “Why would you not want to show indigenous art?” Elliot questions, before elaborating, “the only reason we are showing it is that it’s good, it measures up.”

While the inclusion of well-known artists such as Julian Isaac (UK), Lousie Bourgeois (France), Bill Viola (US), Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan), Jake and Dinos Chapman (UK) and Cai Guo-Qiang (US /China) – who is presenting his ‘exploding series of cars rotating through space’ – reassure visitors that this is very much an international show of international calibre, it is more likely to be the lesser known artists who will delight and surprise.

Highlights include Australian artist Brook Andrews’s large inflatable Jumping Castle War Memorial, and American Angela Ellsworth’s performance Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch (2009), which consists of young women dancing in drab costumes as ‘sister-wives’. The choreographed performance merges a kind of American line dancing with characters from a polygamous religious sect to memorable effect. (On show May 15 at 2:30pm only).

Mean while, Perth-based artist collective pvi can be found in the MCA cloak room equipped with 12 iPhones which they are lending to visitors for half an hour with a directive to explore Sydney central and post virtual ‘tags’ at various GPS points. The aim is encourage participants to “clandestinely take over the city in preparation for an anti-consumerist uprising.”

Artistic Director, David Elliott

David Elliott is a curator, writer, broadcaster and museum director primarily concerned with modern and contemporary art. Elliott was Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England from 1976–1996, Director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden from 1996–2001, the founding Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan from 2001–2006, and in 2007 the first Director of Istanbul Modern, Turkey. From 1998–2004, he was President of CIMAM (the International Committee of ICOM for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) and in 2008, he was the Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor of Art History at Humboldt University, Berlin.

Elliott is a cultural historian whose main interests concern contemporary art, Russian avant-garde and the visual cultures of central and Eastern Europe, Asia and the non-western world from the late nineteenth century. Beginning in the early 1980s, he formulated a series of pioneering exhibitions in one of the first programs to integrate non-western culture with contemporary art. He has published a large number of books, articles and catalogues on these subjects and has curated many exhibitions. He has also written extensively about the present-day role and function of museums and contemporary art.

Exhibitions he has conceived or worked on include: ‘Art and Power: Europe Under the Dictators 1930–1945’ (1995); ‘Wounds: Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art’ (1998); ‘After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe’ (1999); ‘Organising Freedom: Nordic Art of the ’90s’ (2000); ‘Young Video Artists’ Initiative’ (2002); ‘Absences’ (2002); ‘Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art and Life’ (2003); ‘Africa Remix: contemporary art of a continent’ (2004); ‘Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Where is Our Place?’ (2004); ‘Follow Me! Chinese Art at the Threshold of the New Millennium’ (2005); ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto’ (2005); ‘Tokyo-Berlin/Berlin-Tokyo’ (2005); ‘Bill Viola: Hatsu-Yume [First Dream]’ (2006); ‘From Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic’ (2007); ‘Time Present, Time Past: Highlights from 20 Years of the International Istanbul Biennial’ (2007); and ‘The Quick and the Dead: Rites of Passage in Art, Spirit and Life’ (2009).

Themes

THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE / Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age

Situated in the heart of Sydney, in a land that has traditionally regarded distance as a disadvantage, the 17th Biennale of Sydney will celebrate the beauty of distance by including art from around the world.

But why should distance be good or beautiful?

Distance allows us to be ourselves despite the many capacities we share. We are all the same, yet different and it is our differences that make us – according to the circumstances – beautiful, terrifying, attractive, boring, sexy, unsettling, fascinating, challenging, funny, stimulating, horrific or even many of these at once.

More importantly, the idea of distance expresses the condition of art itself. Art is of life, runs parallel to life and is sometimes about life. But, for art to be art (a medium of numinous, sometimes symbolic power), it must maintain a distance from life. Without distance, art has no authority and is no longer special. As art depends on the beauty of distance, beauty in art – a resolution of energy, thought and feeling in aesthetic form – depends on distance as well. Beauty itself can, at times, be terrible as well as alluring. Art can reflect the sweetest or strongest of emotions, it can also express the most traumatic events but, unlike life, nobody gets hurt.

Contemporary art is one of the most important activities in which we can be engaged. If it is any good, it balances enjoyment with wisdom by offering creative, free and open perspectives that are desperately needed in complicated and dangerous times.

The subtitle of the 17th Biennale of Sydney – ‘Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age’ – explores the affirmative power of art in the face of unprecedented threats: conflict, famine, inequity, environmental despoliation and global warming.

This subtitle is inspired by experimental film maker, anthropologist and musicologist Harry Everett Smith (1923–91), whose compilation of historic recordings, the Anthology of American Folk Music, appeared in 1952 at the height of the Korean War and Senator McCarthy’s political witch hunts in the USA. Drawing on blues, jazz, gospel, Cajun and other forms of folk music from people of many origins living across the USA, Smith mapped a modern world that had radically different values to the rapidly proliferating mass consumer culture around him. By doing this, he provided guidance and inspiration for generations of future musicians and listeners. (A program of concerts, performances and events will coincide with the exhibition.)

The 17th Biennale of Sydney will not be broken into sections but will focus on contemporary realities through several thematic ideas:

First Peoples and Fourth Worlds refers to the work of both first and diasporic peoples who have survived suppression and marginalisation. Disdained and persecuted by modernity, these peoples have maintained traditional frameworks for looking at culture and the world, which have nevertheless been strongly affected by this interaction. They are also finding new aesthetic languages that are not based on any sense of marginality to express themselves.

From the Panopticon to the Wunderkammer explores the deep chasm between ideas of ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’. One of the most damaging fantasies of modernity was the idea that there could be a universal view to encompass all people, phenomena and things within set categories. Many museums were founded on such convictions. This view is also made evident in the punitive institution of the Panopticon, the rationalist, Enlightenment prison in which one governor could see all the inmates in their cells from a single, fixed, authoritarian viewpoint. This approach is contrasted with the earlier, more fluid Cabinet of Curiosities, a prototype of the modern museum, which brought together disparate items from different origins as objects of delight and wonderment. In a reversal of history, this Biennale will be a contemporary Wunderkammer, allowing the audience direct experience and enjoyment of a wide range of art that is not categorised in any hierarchical way.

Of Gods and Ghosts takes aesthetic, social and political transcendence as its central theme, looking at memory, belief, history and desire to highlight links between present and past in unusual ways. Continuities of human experience through time are examined – not within a hidebound framework of ‘tradition’, but in terms of how they have evolved to be expressed in contemporary life.

A Hard Rain is concerned with works of a documentary nature, which examine or reflect the current state of the world.

The Trickster is a figure appearing in virtually all cultures – as either god, spirit, man, woman or anthropomorphic animal – and who plays pranks or disrupts normal rules of behaviour. By using the tactics of masquerade, feint and the absurd, the Trickster subversively inserts himself under the skin of pretension to assert the power of art and make a serious point.

Art is both a representation and an embodiment of views of the world, created out of the responsibility of an individual or group. In a sense all representations are political – they express attitudes towards history, culture, relationships and power – yet this does not mean they are all good art. Ideas of beauty and quality in art also, inevitably, reflect back on the world itself and on the different systems of value sustained within it. The making of good art is never a passive act and, more often than not, both the quality and the beauty of a work are expressed in its timely self-consciousness and critical distance.

Quality in art has many faces and can be found in different manifestations across the world. By providing a unique experience of a wide range of good art, THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age will celebrate and express the power of art, as well as its creative richness

The Opening Week Forum: Power, Poverty, Equality and Freedom (and how we relate to art …) will be hosted by the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Friday, 14 May and Saturday, 15 May from 9.30 am until 5.30 pm. This two-day event considers the external forces and hierarchies that affect how we perceive art and comparative aesthetics, bringing together speakers from different disciplines and cultures. The Forum will conclude with the inaugural Nick Waterlow Memorial Lecture, presented by Lawrence Weschler on the subject ‘Serenity and Terror in Vermeer, and After’. Speakers at the Forum include David A. Bailey, Professor Amareswar Galla, Steven Loft and Dr Gerald McMaster OC, along with exhibiting artists Enrique Chagoya, Dana Claxton, Claudio Dicochea, Fiona Pardington, Fred Tomaselli, Ben White and Eileen Simpson.

Biennale Focus I: Distance, Diaspora and Aesthetics in African and Caribbean Art will be hosted at SuperDeluxe@Artspace on Thursday, 13 May at 2 pm. This discussion features panelists David A. Bailey, Roger Ballen, Isaac Julien, Nandipha Mntambo, Professor Colin Richards and Barthélémy Toguo, who discuss issues around diaspora, displacement, poverty and cultural production.

Biennale Focus II: NORTH–SOUTH DIALOGUE will be hosted at Campbelltown Arts Centre on Friday, 21 May from 11 am until 4 pm. Co-convened by Djon Mundine OAM (Indigenous Curator, Contemporary Art, Campbelltown Arts Centre) and Dr Gerald McMaster OC (Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Ontario), the session will consider historical ideas of a north–south dialogue, along with key turning points in art practice and policy for Aboriginal art in both Canada and Australia. It also addresses issues of ‘otherness’ and aboriginality, as well as new agendas for emerging aboriginal artists. Biennale artists taking part in the dialogue include Fiona Foley, Kent Monkman, Christopher Pease, Skeena Reece and Christian Thompson.

The Biennale of Sydney gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the following organisations who have made these programs possible: Deutsche Bank; puma.creative; International Curators Forum; the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS); the United States Studies Centre (USSC) at The University of Sydney; the Faculty of Arts and The Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, The University of Sydney; Canada Council for the Arts; Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada; British Columbia Arts Council; and the Consulate General of Canada, Sydney.

To Whet your appetite even further // Click here to see the Official 2008 Biennale Review Report

During the exhibition, a program of public tours, international guest lectures, artist talks, film screenings and special events are held across the city – and most events are free.

From small beginnings, the Biennale quadrupled in size in less than a decade and progressively reached an important place in Australia’s art calendar. In 2008, attendance soared to over 436,150 visitors.

The Biennale of Sydney’s evolution has been pivotal in promoting cultural exchange with Australia, championing free expression, unveiling new ideas and challenging the status quo – a history of ‘firsts’ that has attracted a healthy dose of controversy and public debate over the years.

During its first decade of exhibitions (1973–82) the Biennale of Sydney was among the first to celebrate Australia’s cultural and ethnic diversity; the first to show indigenous art in an international contemporary art context; the first to focus on the contemporary art of Asia and our own region. It was among the first to present to wide audiences the art of the social change movements which transformed Australian society in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The Biennale of Sydney has the reputation of producing exhibitions that give our community new ways of looking at the world and new ways of seeing and understanding art. Each event enlivens our city’s public spaces with contemporary art and stimulates people to engage with Sydney’s spectacular museums and cultural centres.

The events have proved to be a natural fit with Sydney, reflecting the blend of experiment and enjoyment of innovation that has long been a hallmark of Australia’s largest city.

Instrumental in bringing many of the world’s leading and most established artists to Sydney, the Biennale of Sydney has quickly achieved international recognition and today it ranks as one of the leading international festivals of contemporary visual art and multimedia.