16th Biennale of Sydney (2008) Exhibition Guide by Biennale Sydney

16th Biennale of sydney

fRee GUide

18 JUne – 7 sePteMBeR Bos2008.coM

sydney intRodUction 2008 Biennale welcoMe to the 16th Biennale of sydney Sydney is privileged to host one of the world’s oldest, most celebrated and respected festivals of contemporary art. This year, we celebrate our 35th anniversary and the 16th edition of this internationally renowned biennale. Revolutions – Forms That Turn is one of the most ambitious Biennale of Sydney exhibitions ever staged – presenting works by more than 180 artists from over 42 countries, and including 50 new works created especially for Sydney. Exhibiting works by established and emerging artists in close proximity to artworks from the past will offer audiences an experience that challenges preconceived notions about the art of today. More Australian artists than ever before will exhibit alongside their international peers. In a first for a biennale worldwide, works will also appear in an experimental, constantly evolving online venue: www.bos2008.com/revolutionsonline In another first, the Biennale will exhibit more than 30 site-specific artists’ projects on Cockatoo Island in the middle of Sydney Harbour. We have made it easy for you to reach the island and there will be a free charter ferry service for the short trip during the three-month exhibition.

The Biennale of Sydney exhibition and public programs are also presented free, thanks to the generous support of our exhibition partners and grants from the Australian and participating governments, in addition to a network of generous sponsors, benefactors and supporters. The maps in this Guide show you the location of the venues and we have listed their contact details and opening times. Most venues are open seven days a week and are within easy walking distance of each other. We encourage you to take the Vittoria Biennale Art Walk (see map on pages 6–7). Be sure not to miss unique opportunities to hear artists speak about their works and ideas during the opening week of the exhibition, as well as the public events and educational talks that will run until September. For updates on Biennale artists, special events and public transport tips, please visit our website: www.bos2008.com I hope that the artists and works in the 16th Biennale of Sydney will inspire and challenge you to open the door to a different world. Marah Braye chief execUtiVe officeR Biennale of sydney

of sydney contents 2008 Biennale o contents concePt

aRtist index

MaP of VenUes and free ferry tiMetaBle

cockatoo island infoRMation and access aRtwoRk MaP aRtists on the island eVents on the island

PieR 2/3, walsh Bay infoRMation and access aRtwoRk MaP aRtists at the PieR eVents at the PieR

MUseUM of conteMPoRaRy aRt infoRMation and access aRtwoRk MaP aRtists at the Mca eVents at the Mca

sydney oPeRa hoUse

pp6–7

pp8–25 pp8–9 pp10–11 pp12–23 pp24–25

pp26–31 p26 p27 pp28–30 p31

pp32–51 pp32–33 pp34–35 pp36–46 pp47–51

pp52–55

infoRMation and access PeRfoRMances at the oPeRa hoUse

p52 pp53–55

Royal Botanic GaRdens

pp56–57

infoRMation and access aRtwoRk MaP aRtists in the GaRdens

p57 p56 p57

aRt GalleRy of new soUth wales pp58–81 infoRMation and access aRtwoRk MaP aRtists at the aRt GalleRy eVents at the aRt GalleRy

aRtsPace infoRMation and access aRtwoRk MaP aRtists at aRtsPace eVents at aRtsPace

eVents at otheR VenUes

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pp58–59 pp60–61 pp62–73 pp74–81

pp82–86 p83 p82 pp83–85 p86

p87

online VenUe

pp88–89

eVents calendaR

pp90–94

of sydney concePt 2008 Biennale of ReVolUtions – foRMs that tURn The impulse to revolt. Revolving, rotating, mirroring, repeating, reversing, turning upside down or inside out, changing perspectives. The 16th Biennale of Sydney is a constellation of historical and contemporary works of art that celebrate and explore these dynamics, both in art and life. Through installations, performances, films, texts, an evolving online venue, conversations and other events, Revolutions – Forms That Turn articulates the agency embedded in forms that express our desire for change. Such literal and formal devices are charted for their broader aesthetic, psychological, radical and political perspectives. In politics, ‘revolution’ is a term often considered obsolete, ominous and associated with violence – abrupt and sudden change is seen as impossible or dangerous. We are told that change can only occur as a series of micro-changes or through evolution, not revolution. The idea of revolution has become a lifestyle choice, co-opted into the latest software upgrade. The history of the

word ‘revolution’, however, reveals its ambivalent and paradoxical nature. To revolve means to turn twice (re-volvere), to follow a curvature around and return to where one began – an ecological movement. The ‘space’ explored by this exhibition is the gap between the first part of the title – revolutions – which suggests a directly political and content-based exhibition, and the subsequent phrase – forms that turn – which alternatively suggests the autonomy and isolation of the art object, spinning on its own and detached from daily life, or the energy and potential latent in forms themselves (turns that form). The first term collapses (is overturned) into the second and within that gap perspective suddenly shifts, as when a joke is understood – causing unexpected laughter, a release of tension and a collapse into the comic dimension of radical and absolute presence. It is a space of rotation, confusion, revolt, insubordination, anarchy and disruption of order, a space of ‘revolution’. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev aRtistic diRectoR, 2008 Biennale of sydney

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sydney aRtist index 2008 Biennale of p12 p83 p46 p62 p62 p62 p36 p12 p48 p12 p41 p63 p13 p73 p63 p36 p13 p64 p73 p13 p36 p46 p14 p46 p46 p28 p46 p37 p14 p14 p64 p37 p57 p46 p15 p37 p73 p15 p64 p38 p46 p84 p38 p16 p16 p38 p39

VeRnon ah kee aiPotu alloRa & calzadilla fRancis alÿs ayReen anastas and Rene GaBRi JaMes anGUs iBon aRanBeRRi Micol assaël atelieR Bow-wow and dan GRahaM PedRo BaRateiRo kelly BaRRie thoMas BayRle RichaRd Bell hans BellMeR GoRdon Bennett taMy Ben-toR lene BeRG JosePh BeUys thoMas Bock MaRk BoUlos chRistoPh Büchel chRis BURden GeRaRd ByRne John caGe alexandeR caldeR Janet caRdiff & GeoRGe BURes MilleR aGUstín VíctoR casasola MaURizio cattelan PaUl chan chen xiaoyUn Gianni coloMBo attila csöRGő destiny deacon and ViRGinia fRaseR GUy deBoRd JeReMy delleR siMon denny MaRk dion eMoRy doUGlas MaRcel dUchaMP saM dURant olafUR eliasson Valie exPoRt GeoffRey faRMeR haRUn faRocki and andRei UJica laRa faVaRetto león feRRaRi yeVGeniy fiks

p65 p84 p74 p39 p74 p40 p74 p16 p65 p46 p40 p73 p66 p54 p46 p40 p18 p66 p41 p18 p73 p17 p73 p73 p18 p85 p41 p73 p66 p73 p67 p73 p67 p19 p19 p73 p46 p68 p73 p68 p41 p69 p46 p85 p42 p42 p46 p19 p43

PeteR fischli / daVid weiss claiRe fontaine Ryan GandeR doRa GaRcía Ross GiBson siMRyn Gill liaM Gillick shaUn Gladwell dan GRahaM Rodney GRahaM anawana haloBa aBBie hoffMan ReBecca hoRn PieRRe hUyGhe isidoRe isoU Joan Jonas BRian JUnGen RanBiR kaleka MaRy kelly williaM kentRidGe yVes klein Jannis koUnellis BalanG kUBaRRkU BaRi kUMaR Jin kURashiGe MaRcellVs l. RoseMaRy lainG RichaRd laRteR tiM lee klaRa liden Renata lUcas adolf lUtheR len lye anna MaRia Maiolino nalini Malani kasiMiR MaleVich Man Ray PieRo Manzoni GoRdon Matta-claRk toMMy McRae daVid Medalla MaRio MeRz and MaRisa MeRz MaRi0 MeRz daRiUs Mikšys tina Modotti tRacey Moffatt and GaRy hillBeRG lászló Moholy-naGy tV MooRe ReinhaRd MUcha

p73 p30 p69 p43 p73 p69 p73 p20 p20 p57 p70 p70 p46 p20 p21 p43 p70 p44 p44 p73 p21 p70 p71 p46 p44 p30 p23 p45 p46 p71 p47 p73 p72 p72 p73 p45 p22 p72 p22 p22 p46 p73 p73 p73 p73 p23 p23 p46 p46

saBURo MURakaMi doReen Reid nakaMaRRa BRUce naUMan hélio oiticica and neVille d’alMeida yoko ono RaqUel oRMella GiUlio Paolini coRnelia PaRkeR Mike PaRR GiUsePPe Penone dan PeRJoVschi lia PeRJoVschi GeoRGy PetRUsoV PaUl PfeiffeR sUsan PhiliPsz GiUsePPe Pinot-Gallizio adRian PiPeR MichelanGelo Pistoletto ana PRVacki PUshwaGneR qiU anxionG Michael Rakowitz stUaRt RinGholt aleksandR Rodchenko JUlie RRaP lUiGi RUssolo natascha sadR haGhiGhian shaRMila saMant hans schaBUs caRolee schneeMann tony schwensen RoBeRt sMithson Michael snow nedko solakoV Jesús Rafael soto ViVan sUndaRaM eMily sUndBlad atsUko tanaka JaVieR téllez theweathergroup_U MiRoslaV tichý slaVko tihec Jean tinGUely toMMy tRantino ViktoR VasaRely cleMens Von wedeMeyeR PeteR watkins lawRence weineR Gil JosePh wolMan

Publication editor: sophie forbat copy editor: Robyn flemming Proofreader: Jo tayler design: triggerdesign.com.au Publication assistant: danielle hairs Guide Book text written by carolyn christov–Bakargiev, sophie forbat (sf), Benedetta carpi de Resmini (BcdR), Melissa Ratliff (MR) Printer: Rural Press Pty ltd

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e of sydney sPonsoRs 2008 Biennale

GOVERNMENT PARTNERS

The Biennale of Sydney is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, state and territory governments.

FOUNDING PARTNER SINCE 1973

The Biennale of Sydney is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

MAJOR VENUE PARTNERS

MAJOR PARTNERS

PARTNERS

PUBLIC PROGRAM PARTNERS

SUPPORTERS

PUBLIC PROGRAM AND EDUCATION SUPPORTERS

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The Biennale of Sydney is assisted by the NSW Government through Arts NSW. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Arts NSW through the NSW Government Exhibitions Indemnification Scheme.

EXHIBITION PARTNERS

ACCOMMODATION PARTNER

ARTS MEDIA PARTNER

NEWSPAPER PARTNER

DIGITAL MEDIA PARTNER

DONORS

ARTIST PARTY SUPPORTERS

2008 Biennale of sydney GUide

VenUe details pp32–51

M I

NA BIEN

LE FERRY SERVI CE

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Ge org

COMMISSIONERS STEPS

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VenUe details pp26–31

Y SERVICE FERR

VenUe details pp8–25 D PAI ALTERNATIVE ROUTE (LIMITED EVENTS AT OPERA HOUSE)

VenUe details pp52–55

VenUe details pp88–89

take the VittoRia Biennale aRtwalk

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Made PossiBle thRoUGh the GeneRoUs sUPPoRt of the BalnaVes foUndation

Timetable subject to change

Friday, 20 June. 13:45 ferry will depart from Campbell’s Cove instead of Commissioners Steps

Thursday, 17 July. All ferries will depart and set down at Campbell’s Cove instead of Commissioners Steps (300 metres north along foreshore)

Between 18–22 June (inclusive) and 26–29 June (inclusive) additional services will run from 11:45 so that there is a ferry leaving every half hour from the Commissioners Steps (at quarter past and quarter to the hour)

please note:

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VenUe details pp58–81

Giuseppe Penone

GA RD EN S

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whaRf 2, PieR 2/3, walsh Bay departures

ciRcUlaR qUay

IA B OT AN IC

Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser

Biennale of sydney fRee feRRy tiMetaBle (RoUnd tRiP) 18 JUne to 7 sePteMBeR (inclUsiVe)

SOFITEL

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to CoCkatoo island every day throughout the exhiBition period

fRee feRRy seRVice

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VenUe details pp82–86

too island cockatoo Sydney’s best-kept secret – the extraordinary Cockatoo Island. Just 15 minutes by free ferry from Circular Quay or Pier 2/3

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island cockatoo isla

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For the first time, this year the Biennale takes over Cockatoo Island – the largest island in Sydney Harbour and Australia’s most unusual urban park. A former prison and shipyard, Cockatoo retains many remnants of its past. Its prison buildings have been nominated for World Heritage listing, along with other convict sites around Australia. For this year’s Biennale, 35 artists are utilising buildings and sites across the island. Spend a few hours exploring the exhibition at this wonderful location. A free ferry service leaves hourly every day between 9.45 am and 4.45 pm from the Commissioners Steps outside the Museum of Contemporary Art and from Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay. This shuttle service will also return from the island. Last departure 5.15 pm. (See pages 6–7 for free ferry timetable.)

CoCkatoo island sydney haRBoUR access By fRee feRRy fRoM ciRcUlaR qUay oUtside Mca / PieR 2/3. see pp6–7 foR details oPen daily 10 aM–5 PM Ph: (02) 8969 2100 www.cockatooisland.GoV.aU

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Safety on the Island Cockatoo Island is a former industrial site. Children must be accompanied by an adult at all times. Visitors are requested to wear appropriate footwear and comply with all signage on the island. We ask that you mind your step and beware of hazards. Please do not walk backwards – there are occasional uneven surfaces, hazardous voids and open man holes. A number of buildings are darkened and require extra vigilance. Please take care at all times. There is no smoking in buildings on Cockatoo Island.

katoo island Plans cockatoo island

coRnelia PaRkeR eMily sUndBlad JaVieR téllez

Jin kURashiGe cleMens Von wedeMeyeR

anna MaRia Maiolino

GeRaRd ByRne caMPGRoUnd

toilets

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Micol assaël

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eMoRy doUGlas

RichaRd Bell

JeReMy delleR sUtheRland dock 79 72/73 74 63/67

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VeRnon ah kee

MaRk BoUlos

PaUl chan

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Plans cockatoo island Plans cockat to ciRcUlaR qUay PUBlic feRRy whaRf

MeetinG Point foR toURs

tV MooRe cafe

Biennale office + fiRst aid

Picnic aRea

haRUn faRocki and andRei UJica PeteR watkins

natascha sadR haGhiGhian

toilets 34

aiPotu

sUsan PhiliPsz

shaUn Gladwell

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tURBine hall

qiU anxionG

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fitzRoy dock

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Jannis koUnellis

BUildinG entRance

s cockatoo island aRtists cockatoo VeRnon ah kee

Micol assaël

PedRo BaRateiRo

BoRn 1967 in innisfail, qUeensland, aUstRalia liVes and woRks in BRisBane, aUstRalia

BoRn 1979 in RoMe, italy liVes and woRks in RoMe

BoRn 1979 in alMada, PoRtUGal liVes and woRks in lisBon, PoRtUGal

Micol Assaël’s site-specific artworks impose a physical and challenging experience on her audience, sometimes creating extreme or unbearable environments that are difficult to remain in for a long period of time. She engages reflectively with the physical properties of materials in a meditation that is based on her interests in mathematics, physics and philosophy. In a recent installation, Chizhevky Lessons (2007), in which she referred to the research of Russian scientist Alexander Chizhevky, she created a large electromagnetic field in the gallery space; visitors who chose to enter the exhibition space experienced an electrical charge. For the Sydney Biennale, Assaël revisits the old power station on Cockatoo Island and subtly alters this ‘found’ environment by introducing hermetic drawings that contain secrets about old power systems, literally and metaphorically.

Pedro Barateiro’s poetic photographs, drawings and installations explore the production of social and ideological space, the interpretation of images, and our mediated experience of seeing the world. For the Sydney Biennale, Barateiro has created a group of 82 ‘videopoems’, to be screened (one per day) for the duration of the exhibition in a constructed ‘cinema’ on Cockatoo Island. The artist first creates the films and then adds text and voiceovers, exploring the construction of poetics and adding layers of meaning. Barateiro combines original footage and texts with texts and ideas from writers such as Gertrude Stein, Michel de Certeau, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida. While the videos are grouped into themes – such as the self, architecture, mapping, drawing, politics and aesthetics – each video is an individual work; together they create a composition of fragments that flow from one day to the next.

Vernon Ah Kee’s conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings are a critique of Australian popular culture from the perspective of the Aboriginal experience of contemporary life. For the Sydney Biennale, Ah Kee exhibits 12 charcoal and pastel drawings on canvas that continue his series of portraits of his family. The focus of each subject is their ‘gaze’ – the way they look back at the viewer. Ah Kee’s drawings respond to the history of romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’, and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’ anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time. The drawings inhabit the space as an Aboriginal and ‘human’ presence. On gazing at the oversized portraits the viewer experiences a sense of discomfort, as the confrontational act of the stare, of facing an accuser, of exercising a right of reply, is strongly felt.

Vernon ah kee self portrait (possesses some of the attributes of an artist), 2007 Private collection, Melbourne courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

BcdR

Micol assaël МАЛОГАБАРИТНАЯ РАДИОАППАРАТУРА, 2001–04 courtesy the artist and Galleria zero, Milan

Pedro Barateiro The Altar of Pergamos, 2008 courtesy the artist and Galeria Pedro cera, lisbon

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island aRtists cockatoo island aRtis RichaRd Bell

lene BeRG

MaRk BoUlos

BoRn 1953 in chaRleVille, qUeensland, aUstRalia liVes and woRks in BRisBane, aUstRalia

BoRn 1965 in oslo, noRway liVes and woRks in oslo and stockholM, sweden

BoRn 1975 in Boston, Usa liVes and woRks in london, Uk and aMsteRdaM, the netheRlands

Whether paintings, performances, videos or T-shirts, Richard Bell’s works protest, confront and unsettle common ideas about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians’ relationships to each other, to this country’s history and to art itself. His paintings play with the practice of appropriation, often mining the pop art styles of Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, or the paint drips of Jackson Pollock, while including texts that complicate the way we think about racism and race politics in Australia. ‘Aboriginal Art – it’s a white thing’ is one of the artist’s famous ‘Theorems’, in which he accuses the contemporary art world of manipulating and exploiting Aboriginal art. For the Biennale of Sydney, Bell has created a new video installation in which prominent Australians are psychoanalysed by the artist, who charades as a black Sigmund Freud.

Lene Berg works with video and installations, photography and text. Her work is characterised by a mix of mediums and fictions within the one project, using so-called real persons and events as source material. Inspired by Hippolyte Bayard’s 1840 photograph Le Noyé (The Drowned), Berg explores the paradoxes in which lens-based images are read and interpreted, examining the form and truth of the photographic document. Bayard’s portrait of himself as a drowned man surfaced at the time Louis Daguerre had achieved recognition for his ‘Daguerreotype’, and Bayard’s note on the reverse side of the photograph told an invented, tragic story of the photographer’s demise resulting from his lack of recognised achievement. Berg’s The Drowned One (2008) consists of a video, a series of photographs and a book, taking its point of departure from this staged image and exploring concepts of ‘reality’ and ‘authenticity’.

Swiss-American artist Mark Boulos works with documentary film to investigate the relationship between ideas, ideology and materiality. In the video installation All That is Solid Melts into Air (2008), the corporate colonisation of Nigerian oil resources frames a clash of cultures and beliefs. Two factions indirectly battle over the control of petroleum on two opposite screens. In London, traders speculate on futures while in the Nigerian delta, guerrillas wage war against the corporations that mine and exploit their land. The film focuses on the Ijaw people and the war god Egbisu, who inspires their struggle against foreign companies and their secessionist movement for independence. Through this poetic exploration, contrasted by the religious beliefs of the guerrillas, Boulos investigates the fetishism of the city bankers and reveals the abstract and metaphysical nature of their beliefs.

lene Berg If they had been here I would have looked down on both of them – even without heels, 2007 courtesy the artist

Mark Boulos All That is Solid Melts into Air, 2008 funded by arts council england, london with the support of film london artists’ Moving image network

Richard Bell Scratch an Aussie, 2008 courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

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s cockatoo island aRtists cockatoo GeRaRd ByRne

PaUl chan

chen xiaoyUn

BoRn 1969 in dUBlin, iReland liVes and woRks in dUBlin

BoRn 1973 in honG konG liVes and woRks in new yoRk city, Usa

BoRn 1971 in hUBei PRoVince, china liVes and woRks in hanGzhoU, china

Gerard Byrne makes film, video and photographic works, as well as installations, that reconstruct particular historically charged conversations. He tests the cultural present against the present evoked in the elements of the past that he focuses on in his works. Conceptually interested in acting and theatre, Byrne has worked on a number of projects with actors and sets which test the historical distinctions between sculpture and set design, acting and non-acting and spectacle and spectator. For the Sydney Biennale, he exhibits 1984 and Beyond (2005–07), a work that re-enacts a discussion published in a 1963 issue of Playboy magazine in which well-known science fiction writers collectively speculated about how they envisioned the future world of 1984. He also premieres An exercise with questions and answers (2008) – a video installation compiled from footage the artist filmed of an acting exercise. As in 1984 and Beyond, Byrne bases his project on text, this time transcripts of interviews with war criminals.

Paul Chan is an artist and an activist. He has been working on the digital animation series The 7 Lights since 2005. In these works, the artist projects compositions of light and animation that form an imagined landscape, unfolding with the movement of light. Like the play of shadows, they interact with the space and those who enter it. In 6th Light, the dreamlike, slow-motion image begins with a distended rectangle of light projected on to the floor of the gallery, empty save for an abstract cross reminiscent of a window frame. After a time, indistinct, unidentifiable and fragmentary shadows in varying scales and degrees of focus begin to drift across the space. Groups of these entropic forms overlap in the space and pass each other at different speeds. The cross eventually shatters into shards and in the final moments the screen returns to pure light.

With his video works and largescale photographs, Chen Xiaoyun examines the relationship between the individual and society in China’s rapidly changing cultural climate. His works emphasise the artist’s role in searching for possible ways in which the individual can escape, often using strong, apparently meaningless and anarchic gestures to illustrate the human individual within its environment. <Bi>: A Mythical Wild Animal—–Symbol of Durance (2008) continues the artist’s themes of physical struggle and imprisonment. The video presents a human figure as a modern-day mythical animal, struggling and bewildered in a dark, theatrical and surreal landscape that has been churned and violated by a circling chain of trucks – symbols of the machinery of increasing industrialisation.

Gerard Byrne 1984 and Beyond, 2005–07 courtesy the artist and lisson Gallery, london

Paul chan 6th Light, 2007 courtesy the artist and Greene naftali Gallery, new york Photograph: Jean Vong

chen xiaoyun <Bi>: A Mythical Wild Animal—–Symbol of Durance, 2008 courtesy the artist and the Project, new york

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island aRtists cockatoo island aRtis JeReMy delleR BoRn 1966 in london, Uk liVes and woRks in london

Jeremy Deller investigates the relationships between the public and private spheres, and between ‘high’ and popular culture, through recordings, lectures, performances, exhibitions, publications and archive projects. An event-based collaborative project, The Battle of Orgreave (2002), directed by Mike Figgis, is a filmed re-enactment of a miners’ strike that took place in 1984. The strike led to a violent clash between miners and police at a South Yorkshire coking plant in the English mining town of Orgreave. In order to accurately reconstruct the event, Deller worked collaboratively with various groups, including those involved in the original strike and recruits from battle re-enactment societies from across the UK. The film reflects the profound energy of social collaboration. (See page 83 for more.)

With his video works and large-scale photographs, Chen Xiaoyun examines the relationship between the individual and society in China’s rapidly changing cultural climate. 2-1

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eMoRy doUGlas BoRn 1943 in GRand RaPids, MichiGan, Usa liVes and woRks in the Bay aRea, san fRancisco, Usa

Emory Douglas has lived in the Bay Area of San Francisco, California since 1951. Douglas was the appointed Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party in Oakland from 1967 until its demise in the early 1980s. Trained as a commercial artist during his time spent in prison, his revolutionary designs featured in the Party’s posters and newspapers, which were distributed widely across the United States. Douglas’s distinctive and powerful illustrations in marker, ink, gouache and graphite made him one of the most influential and radical artists of the era. His art and activism played an important part alongside the Party’s other radical activities, debating issues critical to African-American communities and fighting against injustice. For the Biennale, historian and archivist for the Black Panther Party, Bill (Billy X) Jennings, has lent a selection of posters, newspapers and films documenting this time. (For more information, visit www.itsabouttimebpp.com.)

Jeremy deller The Battle of Orgreave, 2002 director: Mike figgis co-commissioned by artangel and channel 4 courtesy artangel, london

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emory douglas Poster from ‘the Black Panther’ newspaper, 19 June 1971 courtesy the artist

s cockatoo island aRtists cockatoo haRUn faRocki

laRa faVaRetto

shaUn Gladwell

BoRn 1944 in noVý Jicin, czechosloVakia liVes and woRks in BeRlin, GeRMany

BoRn 1973 in tReViso, italy liVes and woRks in tURin, italy

BoRn 1972 in sydney, aUstRalia liVes and woRks in sydney

andRei UJica

Lara Favaretto uses sculpture, photography, film and installation to create artworks that produce a sense of magical fantasy and urgency, forming an immediate bond with the viewer through a sense of play. Favaretto calls her works ‘macchine del divertimento’ (fun machines). They are mechanisms whose purpose is to be radically non-productive and non-functional. For the Biennale of Sydney, Favaretto has created a new version of Plotone. A ‘platoon’ of compressed air-tanks, they appear to breathe as timer-released air blows from them periodically, setting in action a chorus of party whistles. It is a festive, alternative chant to the military marching songs of soldiers. ‘An army betrayed or defeated is standing still,’ says Favaretto, ‘compelled to remain in their confined position, like civilian soldiers frustrated in waiting, in a silence interrupted only by single breaths: inhaled through the movement of their red and silver playful tongues.’

Shaun Gladwell poetically links personal experience with contemporary culture and historical references through performance, video and sculpture. His recent works engage these concerns through forms of urban expression such as skateboarding, BMX bikeriding and breakdancing. Ghost Rider (2008) is a sculptural amalgam of mountain bicycles, sound and video. By inserting small speakers into the tubular bicycle frames, Gladwell transforms them into a functioning instrument and assigns the bikes a new, performing vocation. The bicycle ‘organ’ provides accompaniment to Gladwell’s video projection, which depicts bikeriding through Sydney streets at night. The rider performs stunts such as ‘wheelies’ and ‘ghosties’ (the latter referring to the bike gliding autonomously after the rider has dismounted while in motion).

BoRn 1951 in tiMisoaRa, RoMania liVes and woRks in BeRlin and kaRlsRUhe, GeRMany

Assembled under the direction of Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica from independent and state video and film sources, Videograms of a Revolution chronicles the Romanian revolution of 1989 – including the fall, attempted flight and Christmasday execution of President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena. The documentary consists of foundfootage, assembled and intercut to gradually reveal the course of history over the ten days of populist revolt. Using the film and video sources to full advantage, the filmmakers present some of the major moments in the story from multiple perspectives – a strategy that subtly interrogates the use of film in recording history.

BcdR

harun farocki and andrei Ujica Videograms of a Revolution, 1992 courtesy the artists

lara favaretto Plotone, 2005 courtesy the artist and Galleria franco noero, turin; with the support of amici sostenitori del castello di Rivoli, turin

shaun Gladwell In a Station of the Metro, 2006 (detail) Videography: Gotaro Uematsu courtesy the artist and anna schwartz Gallery: sydney and Melbourne

2008 Biennale of sydney GUide

island aRtists cockatoo island aRtis Jannis koUnellis BoRn 1936 in PiReas, GReece liVes and woRks in RoMe, italy

Jannis Kounellis is one of the most challenging artists to have emerged in the 1960s. He moved to Rome from Greece in the late 1950s and became one of the protagonists of arte povera; developing an art of installation using poor materials and alluding to the symbols, weight and practice of labour and its poetic universe of revolutionary associations. Among his earliest iconic works is Senza titolo (Carboniera) [Untitled (Coal container)] (1967) – a square iron container on the floor filled with a pile of coal, reminiscent of the history of the monochrome and in particular of Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square of the early twentieth century. For the Biennale of Sydney, he has imagined the great Turbine Hall on Cockatoo Island as a space filled with air. Inverting inside and outside, the harbour and the shipyard, Kounellis stages a temporary installation: a forest of sails hanging in the Turbine Hall. For Kounellis, the artist is a person who ‘frees things without imposing anything’. This special installation will open during the course of the Biennale. BcdR

(See page 73 for more.)

Jannis kounellis Untitled (project for Cockatoo Island), 2008 courtesy the artist

2008 Biennale of sydney GUide

s cockatoo island aRtists cockatoo BRian JUnGen

williaM kentRidGe

Jin kURashiGe

BoRn 1970 in foRt st John, canada liVes and woRks in VancoUVeR, canada

BoRn 1955 in JohannesBURG, soUth afRica liVes and woRks in JohannesBURG

BoRn 1975 in kanaGawa, JaPan liVes and woRks in tokyo, JaPan and PaRis, fRance

William Kentridge’s art addresses the nature of human emotions and memory, as well as the relationship between desire, ethics and responsibility. He explores the possibilities of poetry in contemporary society, and yet provides a satirical commentary on that society. What Will Come (Has Already Come) (2007), a film seen in a cylindrical mirror on a table, is composed of revolving images – from familiar carousel animals through to tanks and aeroplanes. I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008), for the Biennale of Sydney, is a multi-channel projected work based on The Nose (1837) by Nikolai Gogol. The work is part of an ongoing interest in the roots and trajectory of modernism: a mixture of the absurd, the self-reflective (and the ‘self-divided’), and the forms of fragmentation that one associates with modernism, its crushing in Russia in the 1930s and the longterm trajectory of the terrors of hierarchy.

Jin Kurashige works primarily with video and installation, taking his inspiration from daily life and using fragments, images and feelings from his experiences. The resulting works often contemplate the complexity of life in the contemporary world. In a number of works, Kurashige has explored situations based upon games. In His Shadow Enwraps Me (2006), the fanatical quest to resolve the three-dimensional puzzle of a Rubik’s Cube becomes the subject of Kurashige’s lens. Sweat pouring from his brow and with unbroken concentration, a figure tosses and turns the cube, his constant tapping interrupted only momentarily as he drops the cube to the table to review it. Revolving, rotating, shifting, his intense energy and movement propels this form towards its resolution. Yet, the moment he completes the game and achieves the desired result, he breaks the cube again and starts all over, as if unable to pause and savour his success.

Canadian artist Brian Jungen often creates sculpture by modifying and combining existing goods so that the viewer moves back and forth between the original identity and function of those materials and the new role they perform in his sculpture. His startling and insightful works connect the social and environmental effects of globalised trade in mass-produced objects to the status and power of diversion that these selectively transmit. For the Biennale of Sydney, Jungen will suspend a mobile from an existing structure on Cockatoo Island. The mobile’s sculptural forms are created from hard suitcases, through which Jungen references the experience of travel, long journeys, and feelings of frustration and liberation resulting from lost baggage incidents with airlines. Jungen’s evocation of unclaimed baggage and lost identities expresses the artist’s interest in this separation of material and being. MR

Brian Jungen 1960, 1970, 1980, 2000, 2010, 2007 courtesy catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver Photograph: scott Massey

william kentridge drawing for What Will Come (Has Already Come), 2007 courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, new york and Paris; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; and annandale Galleries, sydney Photograph: John hodgkiss

Jin kurashige His Shadow Enwraps Me, 2006 courtesy the artist and Mizuma art Gallery, tokyo

2008 Biennale of sydney GUide

island aRtists cockatoo island aRtis anna MaRia Maiolino

nalini Malani

tV MooRe

BoRn 1942 in scalea, calaBRia, italy liVes and woRks in são PaUlo, BRazil

BoRn 1946 in kaRachi, Pakistan liVes and woRks in MUMBai, india

Anna Maria Maiolino began her professional practice as an artist in 1958. Her film In-Out (Antropophagy) (1973) is representative of the artist’s work from the 1970s. The work references Brazilian poet, playwright, novelist and revolutionary Oswald de Andrade’s concept of ‘cultural cannibalism’ from the late 1920s, which returned to consciousness in the 1960s in discussions surrounding American cultural imperialism. De Andrade suggested that modernism in Brazil was founded on its consumption of European culture. Maiolino’s film presents two mouths, a male and a female, engaged in wordless conversation. The female mouth has been sealed by adhesive tape and suggests the censorship imposed by the military dictatorship in Brazil, or the frustrations of a woman artist. The film alternates between the two mouths, progressing through various situations and changes; a difference in stubble, the appearance of lipstick, the teeth, and spitting out of coloured threads.

Although Nalini Malani’s practice encompasses a variety of media, including painting, drawing and installation, she is respected as one of India’s first-generation video artists, and for her high sense of awareness regarding social issues and history. Malani’s shadow play installations, including ‘The tables have turned’ A shadow play (2008), expand on the layering that appears in her paintings and drawings. The artist paints on transparent, rotating cylinders onto which light is projected, filling the room with shadows. Referencing Buddhist prayer wheels whose rotations express a desire for change, the cylinders’ revolutions and images build up a narrative of epic proportions that appears and vanishes simultaneously. Accompanied by music and text, the historical, cultural, personal and psychological elements combine to present allegories of political and ecological dangers, with images recalling the horrors of war, the industrial revolution, and the utopia/ dystopia that followed.

BoRn 1974 in canBeRRa, aUstRalia liVes and woRks in sydney, aUstRalia and los anGeles, Usa

TV Moore works with video, film and theatrical forms. Using psychological space, performance, narrative and non-narrative structures, Moore operates in a myriad of worlds where there are stories within stories. He is interested in the space between the real and the unreal, the documented and directed. Escape Carnival (2008), made for the Biennale, is a video and sound installation that utilises the temporal nature of both mediums to consider ideas of journeying and transience, questioning whether there is a beginning and an end, and exploring the psychological space of the individual, at once within and estranged from society. The sound installation is a mix of psychedelia and high pop, obscure B-side references and free-form comment, providing points of departure and narrative while offering no direction. The sound accompanies a vision of a man endlessly running, trapped in an eternal ‘no place’ and progressing only through his own propulsion.

anna Maria Maiolino In-Out (Antropophagy), 1973 courtesy the artist Photograph: Max nauenberg

2008 Biennale of sydney GUide

nalini Malani Remembering Mad Meg, 2007 courtesy the artist Photograph: Johan Pijnappel

tV Moore Escape Carnival, 2008 courtesy the artist and Roslyn oxley9 Gallery, sydney

s cockatoo island aRtists cockatoo coRnelia PaRkeR

Mike PaRR

PaUl PfeiffeR

BoRn 1956 in cheshiRe, Uk liVes and woRks in london, Uk

BoRn 1945 in sydney, aUstRalia liVes and woRks in sydney

Cornelia Parker has spent much of her practice making visible the things beyond our control. Her fascination with volatile, explosive and accidental events has resulted in extraordinary transformations of materials into compelling and contemplative studies of matter. She has steamrollered and exploded objects in reference to ‘cartoon deaths’, while simultaneously foregrounding the uneasy state of modern existence; of living with ambient threat – without the promise of resurrection that her works enact. Chomskian Abstract (2007) explores this sense of impending disaster in the form of an interview with American linguist, philosopher, political activist and author, Noam Chomsky. Alarmed by warnings from climate scientists and speculating on how we have come to be at this point, Parker invited Chomsky to join her for a conversation on this topic. Parker has edited the audio of her questions out of the resulting video, so that the viewer has a space of contemplation in the intervals between Chomsky’s answers, watching his gaze as he listens.

In the derelict and dilapidated building of the former sailors’ quarters and naval ‘academy’ on Cockatoo Island, Mike Parr theatrically stages a presentation of 17 of his most daring and demanding performances since he began exploring the field in 1971 to test the emotional and physical limits of the human body. This dramatic installation on Cockatoo Island, titled ‘MIRROR/ARSE’, presents filmic documentation of his performance works in a deliberately episodic and disconnected way, as the viewer enters into corridors and rooms with peeling walls, collapsed ceilings, undisturbed rubbish and pools of water. Just as the viewer’s encounter with the architecture of the space is traumatic, so do Parr’s works explore trauma and subjectivity. Parr, in the great Expressionist tradition, denounces and is outraged by the brutality of the world we live in. He is revolted by it, and creates poignant artworks where the viewer is confronted with revolting situations, hopefully achieving turns that form consciousness.

BoRn 1966 in honolUlU, Usa liVes and woRks in new yoRk city, Usa and Manila, the PhiliPPines

Paul Pfeiffer’s videos, sculpture, installations and photography dissect the role the mass media plays in contemporary obsessions with celebrity. In a series of videos focused on professional sports events, Pfeiffer digitally re-edited found footage, shifting the viewer’s focus. For the Sydney Biennale, Pfeiffer has created a futuristic sculpture inspired by the Olympic Stadium in Sydney, made in close collaboration with the architects of the original stadium, Bligh Voller Nield Architecture, Sydney. The model, eight metres in diameter, morphs the existing design that seats 80,000 people into a structure that could, if built to scale, accommodate an audience of one million. With its dynamic revolving shape, the vertiginous view inside and the revolutionary vision of its imagined audience, Pfeiffer’s Vitruvian Figure evokes a disturbing apparition of spectacle and pays homage to the modern visions of the first-century BC Roman architect, Vitruvius. sf

cornelia Parker Chomskian Abstract, 2007 courtesy the artist and frith street Gallery, london originally commissioned by the ikon Gallery and sharjah Biennial 8

Mike Parr Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi, 2003 courtesy the artist and anna schwartz Gallery: sydney and Melbourne

Paul Pfeiffer Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (18), 2004 courtesy the artist and the Project, new york

2008 Biennale of sydney GUide

island aRtists cockatoo island aRtis sUsan PhiliPsz BoRn 1965 in GlasGow, scotland liVes and woRks in BeRlin, GeRMany

Interested in the emotive and psychological properties of song and how it can be used as a device to alter individual consciousness, Susan Philipsz’s work deals with the spatial properties of sound. Using her own voice, singing without instrumental accompaniment, Philipsz engages her listeners, temporarily altering their perceptions of themselves so that they become aware of the environment they are in. Creating her own versions of popular music, political songs and film experiences, the artist draws on personal and collective memories to collapse private and public distinctions. The Internationale (1999) is Philipsz’s version of the historical call to action of revolutionary groups worldwide. Originally composed to celebrate the workers involved in the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, the song came to represent communism. In this work the anthem is transformed from rallying cry to a soft, solitary, a cappella voice, broadcast from one solitary speaker and the voice haunts the Turbine Hall on Cockatoo Island.

Cornelia Parker has steamrollered and exploded objects in reference to ‘cartoon deaths’, while simultaneously foregrounding the uneasy state of modern existence.

qiU anxionG BoRn 1972 in GUanGyUan, sichUan PRoVince, china liVes and woRks in shanGhai, china

Qiu Anxiong makes paintings, drawings and video, and has a particular interest in animated drawings. His works respond to the turmoil of cities undergoing transformation and interject calm into the pace of urban life. Qiu’s Buddhist beliefs and his study of the Confucian classics have led to his quiet and contemplative paintings and, more recently, videos. In Jiang Nan Poem (2005), the artist’s first video work, he refers to the passage and return of seasons and time. A simple, poetic and sensitive work, at first glance it appears to be a still image of trees that have shed their leaves, but the perceptible movement of a bird gives away the truth of the moving image. Filmed over the course of a year, this video poem is a study of life and continuity. MR

cockatoo island turbine hall

2008 Biennale of sydney GUide

qiu anxiong Jiang Nan Poem, 2005 courtesy the artist and Boers-li Gallery, Beijing

s cockatoo island aRtists cockatoo eMily sUndBlad

JaVieR téllez

theweathergroup_U

BoRn 1977 in toaRP, sweden liVes and woRks in new yoRk, Usa and GothenBURG, sweden

BoRn 1969 in Valencia, VenezUela liVes and woRks in lonG island, new yoRk, Usa

collectiVe foUnded in 2007, Based in aUstRalia

Emily Sundblad is an artist, curator, singer, actress and co-founder of the artists’ project and gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York. The gallery operates as an ongoing performance project and vehicle for her exploration of the multifaceted production of art. Sundblad has curated a film program as her artwork for the Biennale. She is showing two films she has made with fellow artist and collaborator Amy Granat (Gun and Cake, both from 2007), as well as two hard-tofind films that have been influential in her artistic practice: Daddy by Peter Whitehead and Niki de Saint Phalle (1973), and Les Maîtres Fous by Jean Rouch (1955). Sundblad will also present one-time screenings of the PBS documentary American Experience: Mary Pickford (2005, USA, 90 mins), Ecstasy of the Angels (1972, Japan, 70 mins), a documentary about the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing titled Asylum (1972, UK, 95 mins), and a selection of short performance clips.

Venezuelan and Spanish artist Javier Téllez’s works investigate notions of normality and pathology, power and exclusion, both in contemporary society and through its cultural history. In his exploration of marginalised segments of society, such as the mentally ill or illegal immigrants, Téllez also reveals the structures put in place to curb or control them. His artistic work is characterised by site-specific and unorthodox collaborations. For the Sydney Biennale, One Flew Over the Void (Bala perdida) is a video of his collaboration with a Mexican psychiatric hospital. The performance event Téllez organised with inSite San Diego shows a gathering of the patients, dressed in costumes and animal masks, to witness and celebrate David Smith, the world-record-breaking human cannonball, launching himself across the Mexico–USA border.

Photograph of canadian-born Us screen actress Mary Pickford

Javier téllez One Flew Over the Void (Bala perdida), 2005 courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter kilchmann, zurich

theweathergroup_U is a collective interested in pursuing experimental methods of audio-visual media production, environmental mapping and monitoring technologies, and processes of community-based interaction and knowledge exchange. As artists and media workers, they are primarily concerned with crosscultural digital storytelling methods. Using the interlocking themes of weather, ecology, climate, geography, communications and collaboration, they seek to explore different ways of seeing, listening and documenting the interactions with natural systems that punctuate our daily existence. theweathergroup_U seeks to examine how people from differing social and cultural backgrounds can connect with and further understand the environmental and ecological systems that surround them. Members of the group come from a range of professional and experiential backgrounds. They include Susan Norrie, David Mackenzie, Bryce Anbinis-King Sumugan Sivanesan, Dr Jeremy Walker, Will Tinapple and Danielle Green.

theweathergroup_U theweathergroup_U, 2008 (detail) courtesy the artists and participants

2008 Biennale of sydney GUide

island aRtists cockatoo island aRtis cleMens Von wedeMeyeR

PeteR watkins

BoRn 1974 in GöttinGen, GeRMany liVes and woRks in BeRlin, GeRMany

BoRn 1935 in noRBiton, sURRey, Uk liVes and woRks in PaRis, fRance

German artist Clemens von Wedemeyer constructs installations that inhabit a space between cinema, documentary and the fine arts, incorporating references to cinema classics as well as social comment and historical events. Fascinated by cinema, but working outside of cinematic norms and linear storylines, von Wedemeyer presents sequences, situations and images, utilising references to films and lighting strategies to produce striking displacements of time and space. In Ohne Titel (Rekonstruktion) (2005), a dancer appears and disappears from view, avoiding the camera’s gaze by waiting quietly, face to the wall. The dancer is the choreographer and performer Alexandre Roccoli, and the footage was shot during rehearsals for a solo piece in Villa Gillet, Lyon, France. Von Wedemeyer alters the reality of the time sequence and sets the scene to music, exploring the relationship between body, space and camera, and turning documentary into fiction by the camera’s reconstruction.

Over the course of Peter Watkins’s career, he has produced a significant body of work that engages the worlds of politics, art, history and literature. Watkins combines his cinematic output with critical commentary on the general media situation. La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) is a documentary-style reenactment titled after its subject: the French revolutionary government established by the people of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Emblematic of the impulse to revolution, the film has never officially been screened in Australia. For the Biennale it will be shown in a domestic building on Cockatoo Island, where viewers are encouraged to discuss its contemporary meaning.

otheR aRtists at cockatoo island aipotu andReas siqUeland BoRn 1973 in oslo, noRway liVes and woRks in PaRis, fRance andeRs kJellesVik BoRn 1980 in stoRd, noRway liVes and woRks in BeRlin, GeRMany (see PaGe 83 foR MoRe.) BruCe nauMan BoRn 1941 in foRt wayne, indiana, Usa liVes and woRks in Galisteo, new Mexico (see PaGe 69 foR MoRe.) natasCha sadr haghighian BoRn 1967 in tehRan, iRan liVes and woRks in BeRlin, GeRMany (see PaGe 45 foR MoRe.)

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clement von wedemeyer Ohne Titel (Rekonstruktion), 2005 dancer: aley Roccoli camera: clemens von wedemeyer courtesy the artist

Peter watkins La Commune (Paris, 1871), 2000 courtesy the artist

2008 Biennale of sydney GUide

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ts cockatoo island eVents cockatoo eVents at cockatoo island

BookinGs and infoRMation: (02) 9368 1411 oR ‘what’s on’ www.Bos2008.coM

toURs Mystery tours cockatoo island MeetinG Point eVeRy satURday Between 5 JUly and 6 sePteMBeR, 11.30 aM–12.30 PM

The ‘mystery’ of the tour comes in two parts: each tour with be taken by a different person – an artist, an art critic, a writer or another identity – and each will take in that person’s specially selected works among the many found on Cockatoo Island. Sign up for a mystery tour and all will be revealed! fRee

Bookings essential: ‘what’s on’ www.bos2008.com

Podcast toURs

Take an audio tour of Cockatoo Island with Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Visit the downloads section of www.bos2008.com before your trip to the island for a podcast taking you through the buildings across the Island and exploring the artworks found within.

Mike parr

sUnday 22 JUne, 1 PM (BUildinG 92/93)

paul pfeiffer

tUesday 17 JUne, 2.30 PM (BUildinG 144)

Qiu anxiong

sUnday 22 JUne, 2 PM (GRoUnd flooR, BUildinG 123)

theweathergroup_u

sUnday 22 JUne, 12.30 PM (BUildinG 63/67)

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PeRfoRMances williaM kentridge i am not me, the hoRse is not mine, 2008 cockatoo island BUildinG 123–124 wednesday 18 JUne, 2–3 PM

William Kentridge, one of the most highly regarded artists of his generation, has produced a new work to premiere at the 16th Biennale of Sydney. A first for Kentridge, this work is a lecture/performance held within his own multi-channel video installation in a building on Cockatoo Island. fRee

Bookings essential: ‘what’s on’ www.bos2008.com

keynote lectURes and confeRences

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aRtist talks and conVeRsations

Artist talks at Cockatoo Island will take place in front of their works. Please refer to the floorplan on pages 10–11, or visit the information desk. vernon ah kee

sUnday 22 JUne, 1.30 PM (BUildinG 138)

pedro Barateiro

satURday 21 JUne, 12.30 PM (BUildinG 15)

riChard Bell

sUnday 22 JUne, 12 noon (BUildinG 4)

lene Berg

satURday 21 JUne, 12 noon (BUildinG 2)

Mark Boulos

satURday 21 JUne, 2.30 PM (BUildinG 74)

lara favaretto

satURday 21 JUne, 3.30 PM (BUildinG 120)

shaun gladwell

sUnday 22 JUne, 2.30 PM (GRoUnd flooR, BUildinG 124)

Jin kurashige

tUesday 17 JUne, 1.30 PM (BUildinG 11)

tv Moore

satURday 21 JUne, 2 PM (doG leG tUnnel)

Biennale Constellation 1: neitheR heRe noR theRe – CoCkatoo cockatoo island edUcation hUB, BUildinG 6 wednesday 18 JUne, 10.30 aM–2 PM

In collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics (UNSW), this Biennale ‘constellation’ is a public conversation, involving a wide range of participants, on topics related to contemporary art and its place in society. Neither here nor there – Cockatoo brings artists from the 2008 Biennale together with curators and other writers and thinkers to discuss topics related to inter-cultural experience. Participants include: Sam Durant, Anawana Haloba, Darlene Johnson, Susan Norrie, Hetti Perkins, Michael Rakowitz and Michael Taussig. SESSION 1: THE ETHNOgRAPHER, THE ARTIST, THE COLLABORATOR 10.30 AM–12.10 PM

This session focuses on the interface between art and cultural boundaries. What issues arise for artists who work within specific communities or cultures as outsiders who seek to tell other people’s stories or engage distinctive aesthetics; what politics are needed

2008 Biennale of sydney GUide

island eVents cockatoo island eVen RefeR to PaGes 90–94 foR the fUll 2008 Biennale eVents calendaR acRoss all VenUes

to attend to the complex intercultural terrain; how does the role of the state figure within this encounter; and what new models of sovereignty, of culture, of art itself, are currently being engendered by collaborative crosscultural works? SESSION 2: APOLOgIES...AND OTHER TESTIMONIES 12.30–2 PM

This session will focus on public gestures – like the apology to the Stolen Generation and the performance of testimony. How useful are these gestures and what is missing? How do artists work with and around the theatre of public emotion?

satURday 19 JUly, 10.30 aM–1 PM fRee

Two days of events dedicated to kids. Follow the map to find the treasures of Cockatoo Island, become a pirate for a day, and enjoy the fun activities designed for kids to turn their world upside-down. Explore the history of the island – from the first Australians and early European settlement through to the days when the island was the largest ship-building site in the Pacific region. Catch a free ferry and enjoy a great free day out for all the family.

schools and edUcation

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Bookings essential: ‘what’s on’ www.bos2008.com Catch the 9.45 am ferry from Commissioners Steps (outside MCA) for 10.30 am FORUM eMerging artists and Curators foruM cockatoo island edUcation hUB, BUildinG 6 fRiday 5 sePteMBeR, 3–5 PM

Join artists Emily Sundblad and Klara Liden, curator Massimiliano Gioni (New Museum, New York; Wrong Gallery) and 2008 Biennale of Sydney Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev to discuss contemporary curatorial strategies and the challenges for emerging artists making work today, both globally and locally.

teaChers’ tour: exClusive insights into CoCkatoo island and pier 2/3 for high sChool teaChers Meet at PieR 2/3 infoRMation desk satURday 28 JUne, 10 aM

Biennale Public Program and Education Manager, Dr Dougal Phillips, gives insight into the process and challenges of developing site-specific works for these unique venues. Tristan Sharp (Senior Coordinator of Education Programs, AGNSW) and Justine McLisky (MCA Learning Coordinator Schools and Family Programs) will discuss teaching strategies and Stage 6 Case Study development. In combination with the AGNSW and MCA teacher previews, this tour will provide a model for your own Biennale experience.

Bookings essential: ‘what’s on’ www.bos2008.com

a PaRtneRshiP PRoGRaM Between the Biennale of sydney, aRt GalleRy of new soUth wales and MUseUM of conteMPoRaRy aRt.

kids and faMilies

Bookings essential: ‘what’s on’ www.bos2008.com

revolting kids! treasure Map aVailaBle eVeRy day fRoM JUne to sePteMBeR on aRRiVal at cockatoo island

ResoURces

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Follow the trail and find the clues that lead you on a hunt for specially chosen artworks found on Cockatoo Island. fRee

dedicated kids days

fRee, inclUdes feRRy tRiP fRoM PieR 2/3 to cockatoo island

Revolutions – FoRms that tuRn free exhiBition resourCes online eduCation kit

This kit for K–12 teachers investigates key artists, artworks and themes in the exhibition, with images, questions and activities. student newspaper

revolting kids! cockatoo island MeetinG Point satURday 12 JUly, 10.30 aM–1 PM fRee More revolting kids! cockatoo island MeetinG Point

2008 Biennale of sydney GUide

A stimulus resource for Years 9–12 Visual Arts students looking at selected Biennale artists’ practice relating to the key exhibition themes. Available at all venues. Pick up your education resources online at www.bos2008. com or in venues.

2/3 pier 2/3 pier 2/3 pier 2/3 pier 2/3

At Pier 2/3 waves are explored – sound waves, waves of memory and waves in the landscape

Pier 2/3 was built in the early 1900s and is located in Sydney’s historic waterfront precinct Walsh Bay. It is also Sydney’s last wharf structure in its original state. Since the Biennale of Sydney first used the Pier in 1986, it has become a major venue for the exhibition. Its well-earned reputation as an engaging nonmuseum space and exciting venue for contemporary culture will be underscored by 16th Biennale of Sydney exhibition.

Pier 2/3 hiCkson road Walsh bay open daily 10 aM–5 pM ph: (02) 9247 8780 free ferry to CoCkatoo leaves froM here

2008 biennale of sydney guide

pier 2/3 pier 2/3 pier 2/3 pier 2/3 pier

luigi russolo

Janet Cardiff & george bures Miller

entranCe

inforMation desk and eduCation hub

toilets

photograph: Jeni Carter

doreen reid nakaMarra

2008 biennale of sydney guide

r 2/3 artists pier 2/3 artists pier 2/3 Janet Cardiff born 1957 in brussels, ontario, Canada

george bures Miller born 1960 in vegreville, alberta, Canada live and Work in berlin, gerMany and keloWna, british ColuMbia, Canada

Since the 1990s, the experimental art of Canadians Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller has been a fascinating exploration of how sound affects and shapes our experience. World-premiering at the 2008 Biennale is their largest installation to date, The Murder of Crows – an astounding 100-speaker artwork that envelops the viewer/listener in the experience of the sculptural and physical qualities of sound. The large and cavernous space of Pier 2/3 is filled with speakers mounted on stands, chairs and walls, creating a minimalist ‘flock’. The installation is structured like a play or film, but with images created only by voice, music and sound effects. Inspired by Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters – from the series of etchings called ‘Caprichos’ (c. 1799), which was a denunciation of the evils of society in Spain in his day – the artists have placed a lone megaphone horn on a table in the middle of the space. Out of this horn comes Cardiff ’s voice reciting dreams and thoughts as if, like Goya’s sleeper, she is absorbed in her own nightmares. Using multiple soundscapes, as well as compositions by Freida Abtan, Tilman Ritter and Titus Maderlechner, the artists create a ‘sound play’ that physically envelops the listener in a moving field of sound and music. Morphing in a dreamlike way from war marches to lullabies, the piece is a requiem to today’s battered world. (This artwork has a 30-minute duration. Seating provided.)

photograph: Jeni Carter

The Murder of crows a sound installation

2008 biennale of sydney guide

artists pier 2/3 artists pier 2/3 artis

Janet Cardiff & george bures Miller script sketch for The Murder of Crows, 2008 Courtesy the artists

2008 biennale of sydney guide

r 2/3 artists pier 2/3 artists pier 2/3 doreen reid nakaMarra

luigi russolo

born c. 1948 Warburton ranges, australia lives and Works in kiWirrkura, australia

born 1885 in portogruaro, veneto, italy died 1947 in Cerro di laveno, varese, italy

Doreen Reid Nakamarra was born in the Warburton Ranges, in far eastern Western Australia. As a young girl, she walked with her parents and other family members to Haasts Bluff, an Aboriginal settlement in Central Australia. The family later moved to Papunya. Nakamarra travelled to Kintore, about 500 kilometres west of Alice Springs, in the early 1980s and later settled in Kiwirrkura, occasionally travelling south to Warakurna and Warburton to visit relatives. She completed her first paintings in 1996. For the Biennale, Doreen Reid Nakamarra has produced a large painting depicting designs associated with the rockhole and soakage water site of Marrapinti, west of the Pollock Hills in Western Australia. Her pictorial style is based on repeated gestures and lines that build up a threedimensional optical field suggestive of specific stories associated with her land, but possibly also of movement generally – immaterial waves that move the world continuously.

The Italian futurist artist Luigi Russolo was the son of an organist in the local cathedral; his brothers were also musicians. In 1913 he wrote his manifesto on sound, The Art of Noises. He believed in erasing the boundary between ‘sound’ and ‘noise’, and that there must be continuity between music and all the noises of human existence. Russolo’s instruments, the noise-making machines he called Intonarumori, 2-1 show his experiments in creating a palette of noise and sound. These machines, basic in appearance, consist of solid boxes fitted with metal speakers. Their design allows them to produce an infinite variety of timbres according to the noise chosen. With his assistant Ugo Piatti, Russolo prepared the Intonarumori for a number of full-scale concerts that he 2-2 conducted from 1914.

Russolo believed in erasing the boundary between ‘sound’ and ‘noise’, and that there must be continuity between music and all the noises of human existence.

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(See page 71 for more.)

2-3

luigi russolo russolo and his assistant ugo piatti with their Intonarumori Courtesy pietro verardo, venice

2008 biennale of sydney guide

events pier 2/3 events pier 2/3 event refer to pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues bookings and inforMation: (02) 9368 1411 or ‘What’s on’ WWW.bos2008.CoM

events at pier 2/3 tours

floor Talk: carolYn chrisTov-bakargiev, arTisTic direcTor, 2008 biennale of sYdneY saturday 5 July, 1–2 pM

Join 2008 Biennale Artistic Director Carolyn ChristovBakargiev as she takes you through the conversations between the historical and contemporary works being exhibited at Pier 2/3. free

Presented by the Biennale of Sydney, the City of Sydney, Accessible Arts, Pier 2/3, Museum of Contemporary Art and Public Programs 2008 Art Gallery of New South Wales. AUSLAN interpreters from Deaf Society of NSW. Audio describers from Vision Australia. free

Information and bookings through Accessible Arts: (02) 9251 6499 (ext 6) or amclaren@aarts.net.au

sChools and eduCation

floor Talk: dr dougal PhilliPs, Public PrograM and educaTion Manager of The biennale, wiTh sPecial guesT, on JaneT cardiff & george bures Miller saturday 26 July, 1–2 pM free floor Talk: dr dougal PhilliPs, Public PrograM and educaTion Manager of The biennale, wiTh sPecial guesT, on luigi russolo saturday 2 august, 1–2 pM free floor Talk: heTTi Perkins on doreen reid nakaMarra saturday 30 august, 1–2 pM

Hetti Perkins (Curator Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales) will discuss the work of Doreen Reid Nakamarra in the context of the works on display at Pier 2/3. free

artist talks and Conversations

Teachers’ Tour: exclusive insighTs inTo cockaToo island and Pier 2/3 for high school Teachers Meet at pier 2/3 inforMation desk saturday 28 June, 10 aM

Bookings essential: ‘What’s on’ www.bos2008.com sChool itineraries available froM WWW.bos2008.CoM/page/ sChools.htMl

george bures Miller

Wednesday 18 June, 10.30–11 aM

free

events lord MaYor’s coMMuniTY access daY saturday 23 august, 10 aM–4.30 pM pier 2/3 events at 10 aM & 12.30 pM

A day-long event that opens up the exhibition’s key themes and artworks for people with disabilities and their carers. Lord Mayor’s opening address 10 am (AUSLANinterpreted event) and AUSLAN tour; audio-described tour 12.30 pm. A free bus is available between the three venues. See page 94 for full event schedule.

2008 biennale of sydney guide

resourCes Revolutions – FoRms that tuRn free exhibiTion resources online educaTion kiT

This kit for K–12 teachers investigates key artists, artworks and themes in the exhibition, with images, questions and activities. sTudenT newsPaPer

y art MuseuM of Con A major venue of the Biennale of Sydney since 1998, the MCA is an internationally respected and locally loved museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting the work of contemporary artists from Australia and around the world

2008 biennale of sydney guide

nteMporary art Muse MuseuM of conTeMPorarY arT 140 george street the roCks open daily 10 aM–5 pM ph: (02) 9245 2467 WWW.MCa.CoM.au

2008 biennale of sydney guide

The Museum of Contemporary Art is Australia’s only museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting the work of contemporary artists. Located on Sydney’s iconic Circular Quay in a striking architectural building, the MCA presents a dynamic program of exhibitions and events that explores the latest international and Australian contemporary art.

Visitors can engage with artists and their ideas through a diverse range of events, including artist talks, live performances, lectures, workshops and youth programs. The internationally respected and locally loved institution is an intrinsic part of Australia’s cultural fabric and last year was voted Sydney’s favourite museum by local residents.

teMporary art plans MuseuM of Cont alexander Calder olafur eliasson reinhard MuCha

level 3

Christoph b端Chel

geoffrey farMer

roseMary laing tina Modotti Julie rrap

eduCation hub

giuseppe penone

MiChelangelo pistoletto

vivan sundaraM

anaWana haloba

taMy ben-tor

level 2

level 1

saM durant entranCe (CirCular Quay West)

2008 biennale of sydney guide

teMporary art plans MuseuM of Con Maurizio Cattelan rodney grahaM lászló Moholy-nagy Man ray aleksandr rodChenko

siMryn gill

allora & Calzadilla david Medalla traCey Moffatt and gary hillberg

lifts Mary kelly kelly barrie

Chris burden

laWrenCe Weiner

hélio oitiCiCa

yevgeniy fiks

geoffrey farMer

Joan Jonas

entranCe (george st) natasCha sadr haghighian dora garCÍa giuseppe pinot-gallizio

lifts siMon denny

Miroslav tiChÝ

ana prvaCki

ibon aranberri destiny deaCon and virginia fraser león ferrari Mario Merz

MCa store

attila CsörgŐ

guy debord pierre huyghe isidore isou hans sChabus gil Joseph WolMan

lifts

Cloak rooM + inforMation

John Cage

saM durant

sharMila saMant

2008 biennale of sydney guide

eMporary art artists MuseuM of Con ibon aranberri

taMy ben-tor

Christoph büChel

born 1969 in itziar, basQue Country, spain lives and Works in bilbao, spain

born 1975 in JerusaleM, israel lives and Works in neW york City, usa

born 1966 in basel, sWitzerland

Ibon Aranberri is interested in decoding the system of common accepted images, values and preconceptions set in place in society – a system that often leads to paranoia. His work is not directly political, but looks at ‘political art’ and its systems of representation. Ethnics (1998) is a table with materials and objects on it, ranging from a Basque shepherd’s milk carton to pieces of rubber – a still life that suggests the way the police display evidence of bomb-making after a raid on a terrorist cell. The work evokes the visual codes used to frame ‘terrorism’ in the media, using the arrangements made by the police to show evidence of illegal activity. It reflects upon how easy it seems to be to create ‘evidence’. Every piece on the table has – it might seem to the viewer – in the nick of time been prevented from entering into a dangerous relation – to form a bomb.

ibon aranberri ethnics, 1998 la gaia Collection, busca Courtesy the artist

Tamy Ben-Tor is a video-maker and performer whose characters embody stereotypes from various cultures and circumstances. Ben-Tor says of the development of her characters: ‘Sometimes they mirror my mind’s demons, and sometimes I watch them unfold before me.’ Nationality and race are embedded in language, and a person’s identity is revealed through their speech. Ben-Tor’s performances draw on the image and language of her characters, which she takes to nonsensical extremes. In doing this, Ben-Tor makes their identity and politics bizarre, abstract and often comic; she brings them into ‘the domain of idiocy’. Gewald shows the artist in various guises that reflect the neurotic and almost pathological nature of their dogmas. Words flow out of her persona like a continuous eruption of energy and associations, a montage with constant shifts of tone and attitude.

Christoph Büchel is known for his conceptual projects and complex large-scale installation pieces. In some of his projects he explores the unstable relationship between security and internment, placing visitors in the contradictory roles of victim and voyeur. This experience becomes the means by which collective tensions and traumas might be unearthed. For the Sydney Biennale, Büchel presents two conceptual projects: Guards involves having inmates in Australian prisons guarding the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, which stands where the ‘First Fleet’ of prisoners from England came ashore in 1788. For the second project No Future a group of people, aged over 80 years, practise continuously the song ‘God Save the Queen’ (1977) by the English punk band The Sex Pistols in one of the galleries.

tamy ben-tor Gewald, 2007 Courtesy the artist and zach feuer gallery, new york

Christoph büchel close Quarters, 2004 Courtesy the artist and hauser & Wirth zürich london

2008 biennale of sydney guide

nteMporary art artists MuseuM of Co Maurizio Cattelan

attila CsörgŐ

siMon denny

born 1960 in padua, italy lives and Works in neW york City, usa

born 1965 in budapest, hungary lives and Works in budapest

Maurizio Cattelan has been creating startling, disturbing and controversial artworks since the early 1990s. His sculptures, installations and interventions encourage the viewer to experience doubt as a primary response to contemporary life. At times a joker, Cattelan is known for his dark sense of humour. Novecento, one of his most renowned works, is an unusual still life – a taxidermic horse suspended from the ceiling by leather slings. The horse’s legs are strangely elongated, as if gravity had stretched them downwards. This work makes reference to the 1976 film 1900 (pronounced Novecento in Italian) in which director Bernardo Bertolucci explores Italy’s painful passage to modernity. As in the film, which presents fascism and communism in opposition, Cattelan expresses a sense of blocked energy. A saddled horse is a means of transportation and mobility; here it is rendered immobile. His work is a eulogy for the end of the great revolutionary impulses that characterised the twentieth century.

Attila Csörgo works with lights and photography, kinetic structures and changeable geometrical forms. Csörgo presents the reality of systems and phenomena that we normally do not admit. By observing ordinary phenomena under extraordinary conditions, Csörgo creates experiments, often surprising and entertaining, to foreground questions about perception and how we construct our vision of the world. Slanting Water (1995) is Csörgo’s key early work, almost foundational for all his later practice. In this photograph, two glasses filled with water sit on a table. The photograph appears to have been artificially altered, as the water slants in opposite directions in the two glasses. This effect is not an illusion, however; it was created by spinning the table on which the glasses and camera all stood, so that the water was pictured in a centrifuge.

born 1982 in auCkland, neW zealand lives and Works in auCkland and frankfurt aM Main, gerMany

New Zealand artist Simon Denny presents his audiences with situations. Constructions of everyday materials are combined with domestic readymades and found imagery in installations that emphasise relationships within communities of things. He is interested in connections and associations of form, purpose and action. One of his simplest works is a blanket rubbed against a wall so that the electrostatic energy holds the blanket on the wall for several days. For the Biennale, Denny has created an installation inspired by an actual event – when the poet and artist Wystan Curnow was asked in the early 1970s to assess the performance of a young art student, Peter Roche, at an Auckland art school. His text, written during the performance, explores boredom and performance art. Denny recreates the event in a new domestic-looking installation which repeats – yet transforms – that experience into one of attention/ boredom today.

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Maurizio Cattelan Novecento, 1997 Castello di rivoli Museum of Contemporary art, rivoli-turin gift of the supporting friends of the Castello di rivoli

2008 biennale of sydney guide

attila Csörgő slanting water, 1995 Courtesy the artist and galerija gregor podnar, ljubljana/berlin

simon denny Video 2, 2008 Courtesy the artist and Michael lett, auckland

eMporary art artists MuseuM of Con saM durant

geoffrey farMer

león ferrari

born 1961 in seattle, usa lives and Works in los angeles, usa

born 1967 in eagle island, british ColuMbia, Canada lives and Works in vanCouver, Canada

born 1920 in buenos aires, argentina lives and Works in buenos aires

Sam Durant has used installation, drawing, sculpture and text since the early 1990s to explore language and society, and how individuals and groups articulate their concerns publicly. Durant’s work takes a critical view of social, political and cultural issues, and explores the varying relationships between popular culture and fine art through a variety of materials and processes. His diverse subjects include the civil rights movement, southern rock music and modernist architecture. For the Biennale, the artist has created a series of illuminated signs containing de-contextualised quotes from placards used during protest demonstrations within the Aboriginal civil rights movement in Australia and from African American and Native American civil rights movements in the United States. It is art about the use and meaning of political language in society. A number of these light boxes are on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art and one is exhibited at Artspace.

Geoffrey Farmer is interested in the process of making things, and in the relationship between experience and imagination. He creates structures that transform and activate the gallery space and its visitors, incorporating objects that are often in a state of flux. Cockatoo Clock (A Play) is a fictional theatrical production imagined to take place within the walls of the Museum of Contemporary Art during the Biennale. The viewer can see only glimpses of the performance, which is, for the most part, hidden. Specially built sets are exposed and can be seen through openings in the museum’s walls. The play was inspired by a found object; a small glass cabinet transformed into an imaginary clock and placed on a warehouse wall by an unknown Cockatoo Island worker. Reminiscent of avant-garde theatre, the play’s form and content become the premise and means that allow the sets and props to become the main characters.

León Ferrari has created an intensely politicised art since the 1960s. He has made ink drawings, collages, sculptures, photographs, books, objects and installations. His works are poetic, combative and caustic; through them, he has questioned all authority, especially religious and military institutions that claim to reveal the truth or to exist in the name of justice. In 1965, at the time of the first US bombings in Vietnam, Ferrari made A civilização occidental e cristã, (Western Christian Civilisation) (1965) in which he combined two elements – a sculpted figure of Christ mounted on a scale-model replica of an American FH 107 fighter aircraft. Suspended in a vertical position, the plane suggests imminent descent and bombing. The work, which was censored in Argentina at the time, refers also to local history and events in Latin America, including the alliance of the United Sates with the Argentinian government, which Ferrari felt was being hypocritically justified as a defence of Christian and western values.

geoffrey farmer A Pale fire freedom Machine, 2005 (detail) rennie Collection, vancouver Courtesy Catriona Jeffries gallery, vancouver photograph: rafael goldchain

león ferrari A civilização occidental e cristã, (western christian civilisation), 1965 Collection alicia and león ferrari, buenos aires photograph: ramiro larrain

(See page 84 for more.)

sam durant designs for end white supremacy, 2008 and 200 Years of white Lies, 2008 Courtesy the artist and blum & poe, los angeles; with support of the farrell family foundation

2008 biennale of sydney guide

nteMporary art artists MuseuM of Co yevgeniy fiks born 1972 in MosCoW, russia lives and Works in neW york City, usa

Yevgeniy Fiks traces forgotten chapters of history and, in doing so, exposes the ways in which cultures are shaped and their enemies constructed. In a number of recent works, Fiks has investigated the history of the Communist Party in various places around the world where he is invited to exhibit. Recently, he ‘mapped’ the American Communist Party history in New York and created the Communist Guide to New York (2008), identifying sites of significance and documenting a lost political history. For the Sydney Biennale, with the help of local Sydney historian Robert Dick, Fiks has created the Communist Guide to Sydney (2008), a collection of over 40 photographs of buildings, public places and sites in Sydney that are connected to the history of the Australian Communist Party. The sites include buildings that housed the headquarters of the party at different times, residences of important Australian communists, and parks and squares where significant party-led meetings and demonstrations took place.

yevgeniy fiks communist Guide to sydney (site #1), 2008 Courtesy the artist

2008 biennale of sydney guide

Sam Durant’s work takes a critical view of social, political and cultural issues, and explores the varying relationships between popular culture and fine art.

dora garCÍa born 1965 in valladolid, spain lives and Works in brussels, belgiuM

In the dystopia envisioned by Ray Bradbury’s science fiction story ‘Fahrenheit 451’, books have been burned and their contents remain only in the minds of members of an underground resistance – revolutionaries who learn their contents by heart. Written in the early years of the Cold War, the novel is an indirect critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society. In Dora García’s work, she has printed the book in reverse, as a mirror image of itself. Her ‘reversed’ books ask us to consider issues of participation, access and readability and reflect on an inverted world where forms of cultural resistance may be truly necessary. What A Fucking Wonderful Audience (2008) is a second project by García at MCA – a series of performances in the form of guided tours of the exhibition. This artist also presents a performance at the Sydney Opera House. (See page 53 for more.)

dora garcía fahrenheit 451 (1957), 2002 photograph: fréderic buisson

eMporary art artists MuseuM of Con siMryn gill

anaWana haloba

Joan Jonas

born 1959 in singapore lives and Works in sydney, australia and port diCkson, Malaysia

born 1978 in livingstone, zaMbia lives and Works in oslo, norWay and aMsterdaM, the netherlands

born 1936 in neW york City, usa lives and Works in neW york City

Simryn Gill uses a range of methods, including collecting, casting, writing, drawing and photographing. Mine consists of small spheres made from elements found around her two studios in Sydney and Port Dickson (Malaysia), such as paper bark, discarded bits of electrical wire, hair bands and shoelaces found on the street, various termite soils, tropical vines, mangosteen skins and yams. These forms include: a rock discovered on a walk; a pomegranate bought from a local market; or a brick tumbled into roundness by years of wave action on a beach. These materials, with their own dense and particular histories, have been rolled, stroked, woven, wound, caressed into silent, mute forms to make small balls of mobility and resistance.

Anawana Haloba works with performance-based video and sound installations, using her own body as a medium. Haloba’s work explores the position of women within varied social and cultural contexts. In a number of works she has created ‘salt-licked maps’, tracing patterns in salt with her tongue as a performative gesture to represent the cultural barriers of language in immigrant experience. For the Sydney Biennale, Haloba’s video installation When the Private Became Public (2008) is based on a film made with five female participants from different cultural backgrounds, set against a harsh Australian desert landscape. The work explores the revolutionary turns that have resulted in women traversing the private realms and now entering into the public sphere traditionally not attributed to them – providing a contemporary perspective on prefeminist ideologies.

A founder of video and performance art, Joan Jonas was originally a sculptor who began to participate in experimental dance workshops and in 1968 held her first performance. Since then, her work has explored the transformation of the performing body through perception, space and media. Her use of masks and mirrors, as well as her adoption of different mythological and contemporary personas, point to her exploration of identity as fragmentary and contingent. Reading Dante (2008) is inspired by Dante’s early-fourteenthcentury Divine Comedy, incorporating elements from ‘Inferno’ and ‘Paradiso’. In this work, Jonas combines scenes from the woods of northern Canada, a performance in Italy, a modernist ruin built in a lava field in Mexico City and 1970s footage of deserted New York City streets. Unlike in Dante’s medieval universe, here we experience a world full of connections, and no person or place alone can represent heaven and hell; this is Jonas’s infernal paradise. Mr

(See page 87 for more.)

simryn gill Mine, 2008 Courtesy the artist; breenspace, sydney; and tracy Williams ltd, new york

anawana haloba when the Private Became Public, 2008 Courtesy the artist; rijksakademie, amsterdam; and notam02 studios, oslo produced during a residency at Casula powerhouse arts Centre; with support from the office for Contemporary art norway

2008 biennale of sydney guide

nteMporary art artists MuseuM of Co Mary kelly

roseMary laing

david Medalla

born 1941 in fort dodge, ioWa, usa lives and Works in los angeles, usa

born 1959 in brisbane, australia lives and Works in sydney, australia

kelly barrie

Rosemary Laing has worked with photography since the 1980s. In her photographs, she brings together elements of performance art, the documentary image and objects. Her series of photographs called weather shows a performer caught in a maelstrom, buffeted by high wind and surrounded by newspaper detritus. The performer appears to be within a locationless void, in which the state of events and their cause remain ambiguous. A landscape thrashed by violent storms provides the counterpoint for her action. The vortex appears to disable the performer’s control of her own movements; these external weather forces seem to dictate her actions and rotations. The images were made in Eden, a small fishing town in southern New South Wales. For the Sydney Biennale, these photographs are accompanied by one dozen weather drawings – a selection of Laing’s preparatory drawings for the series, exhibited publicly for the first time.

born 1942 in Manila, the philippines lives and Works in london, uk, neW york City, usa and paris, franCe

born 1973 in london, england lives and Works in los angeles, usa

Kelly Barrie was born in 1973, an unwitting participant in a major artistic project – his mother Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973– 77). Kelly’s large-scale work visualises and analyses the mother–child relationship between herself and her son over a period of four years from his birth. In the late 1990s, Barrie began his own career as an artist. This exhibition brings together works by both artists, suggesting a form of time that overlaps and repeats, consciousness that spirals from one generation to the next – the work of Barrie echoing and yet moving away from his mother’s concerns. Kelly’s Antepartum (1973) is a document of her pregnancy; a close-up shot records her hand as she caresses her abdomen at full term. Barrie’s Astral Fields (2008) is a video-recording showing him holding flour tightly in his fist and then releasing it into the atmosphere.

kelly barrie Astralfields and other Manifestations, 2008 Courtesy the artist and angstrom gallery, los angeles Mary kelly Antepartum, 1973 Courtesy the artist

2008 biennale of sydney guide

rosemary laing weather #12, 2006 Collection of Janet and Michael buxton rosemary laing is represented by galerie lelong, new york; galerie Conrads, düsseldorf; and tolarno galleries, Melbourne

David Medalla is a pioneer of land art, kinetic art, participatory art and live art, and has been working since the early 1960s. He constantly shifts his strategies, and his works entrap the transitory moment and celebrate change and flux. A truly avant-garde artist and a free spirit, Medalla’s practice is diverse. His signature artworks are a series of bubble machines he calls Cloud Canyons made since the early to mid-1960s. Made of perspex, water, soap and pumps, they constantly produce foam and bubbles in the exhibition space, a hypnotic cascade of continually changing forms reminiscent of a slow-motion film of clouds. Sculpture is no longer static. Medalla questioned authorial intention in these works, in favour of chance configurations, and celebrated life against the inert nature of traditional sculpture and the notion of art as something permanent.

david Medalla cloud canyons, 1967 auckland art gallery toi o tāmaki purchased 1987

eMporary art artists MuseuM of Con tina Modotti

traCey Moffatt

born 1896 in udine, italy died 1942 in MexiCo City, MexiCo

born 1960 in brisbane, australia lives and Works in sydney and brisbane, australia and neW york City, usa

Revolutionary Italian avant-garde photographer Tina Modotti began her career as an actress and model, posing for photographers, including Edward Weston. In 1923 Modotti moved with Weston to Mexico City, where she ran his photographic studio in exchange for lessons in photography. Her early work explored elements of nature and architectural detail. Later influenced by the great political and cultural fervour during the Mexican revolution, she used the camera as an instrument of inquiry and political communication. Modottiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s works reveal a concern for aesthetics and composition. She photographed artists and people in daily life, as well as exploring the genre of still life. In Woman with Flag (1928), a woman with a banner over her right shoulder is isolated and set against the horizon, creating an iconic political image. bCdr

tina Modotti woman with flag, 1928 Courtesy throckmorton fine art, new york

gary hillberg born 1982 in perth, australia lives and Works in Melbourne, australia

Working since the late 1980s as an experimental filmmaker and a producer of music videos, Tracey Moffatt has created photography, film and video that are concerned with power relations, hysteria, the media and forms of escape from stereotyped subjectivities. Moffatt has directed a series of filmic montages edited in collaboration with Gary Hillberg. For the Biennale, Moffatt and Hillberg present REVOLUTION (2008), a study of the stereotypes associated with revolution in movies. It explores constructions of those stereotypes, both by revelling in revolutions on the wide-screen and by portraying the presumed disastrous after-effects that cinema conveys. Excerpts from well-known films are juxtaposed with clips from B movies in a dynamic and highly crafted composition accompanied by a rhythmic and melodramatic soundtrack.

Tracey Moffat and Gary Hillberg revel in revolutions on the wide screen and portray the presumed disastrous after-effects that cinema conveys.

tracey Moffatt and gary hillberg reVoLuTIoN, 2008 Courtesy the artists and roslyn oxley9 gallery, sydney

2008 biennale of sydney guide

nteMporary art artists MuseuM of Co reinhard MuCha

hélio oitiCiCa

giuseppe pinot-gallizio

born 1950 in düsseldorf, gerMany lives and Works in düsseldorf

born 1937 in rio de Janeiro, brazil died 1980 in rio de Janeiro

born 1902 in alba, italy died 1964 in alba

Reinhard Mucha emerged in the 1980s as a leading figure in a new European art movement in sculpture that explored forms alluding to architecture and built spaces. Mucha created three-dimensional works that investigated a sense of solitude and loss manifested through references to living spaces and absence. He constructed works that combined old found objects with new materials. The constructions were made from recycled elements that refer to the systems for displaying art – such as plinths, vitrines, cases, lighting systems – or to the work and infrastructure necessary to achieve an exhibition display – ladders, lights, tape, wires. These ephemeral assemblages of objects were taken apart at the end of an exhibition. For the Biennale, Mucha has created a new artwork with sound and images that reflects on the first ephemeral installation he ever made, during the 1980s, on the theme of the carousel. He uses equipment from the AV department of the Museum of Contemporary Art, placed on dollies as if it still needs to be installed.

neville d’alMeida

Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio was at the centre of the radical artistic and intellectual movements that developed in the second half of the 1950s in Europe. In 1955, he met the Danish artist Asgar Jorn and founded the International Movement for an Imaginistic Bauhaus. The first congress of the group, held in 1956, became the founding moment of the new International Situationist movement and is known today as the ‘Alba Congress’. Lettriste artists Guy Debord and Gil Joseph Wolman were invited to Alba to participate in fervent discussions on art, life and revolution. Non-functionalism, play and nomadism were important to Pinot-Gallizio. In Senza titolo (Rotolo di pittura industriale) [Untitled (Roll of Industrial Painting)], he spraypainted a long roll of canvas, which he then exposed to the sun and wind. He called this work ‘industrial painting’. It could be cut and sold by the metre, thus denying the idea of art as something elitist and detached from real life.

reinhard Mucha ohne Titel, (die Letzten werden die Letzten sein, Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1982), 2008 Courtesy the artist and luhring augustine, new york

2008 biennale of sydney guide

born 1941 in belo horizonte, brazil lives and Works in rio de Janeiro, brazil

Hélio Oiticica was one of the most experimental artists of the 1960s, breaking down the boundaries between artwork and viewer in favour of participation and pleasure. He drew inspiration from everyday materials. Oiticica believed in liberating the viewer and saw his installations of sound, mattresses, live animals, rubber and sand as spaces of emancipation. In 1971, Oiticica moved to New York and began incorporating elements from film to create environments that he called ‘quasi-cinemas’ experiments in film, sound and slide projections that were collaborations with filmmaker Neville D’Almeida. Installations such as Quasi-cinemas / CC5 Hendrix War (1973) challenge the assumption that the spectator is passive when viewing cinema. Cinema and art are merged – creating playful environments where the viewers participate in an enveloping sensorial experience.

hélio oiticica and neville d’almeida Quasi-cinemas / cc5 hendrix war, 1973 Collection inhotim Centro de arte Contemporânea, Minas gerais photograph: eduardo eckenfels

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giuseppe pinot-gallizio senza titolo o rotolo di pittura industriale, 1958 Courtesy archivio gallizio, turin

eMporary art artists MuseuM of Con MiChelangelo pistoletto

ana prvaCki

Julie rrap

born 1932 in biella, piedMont, italy lives and Works in biella and turin, italy

born 1976 in panCevo, serbia lives and Works in singapore

born 1950 in lisMore, australia lives and Works in sydney, australia and brussels, belgiuM

Michelangelo Pistoletto is a key figure of the arte povera movement that emerged in Turin and other Italian cities in the mid-1960s. He explores the relationship between the individual self and the community through a wide array of materials and techniques, and organises Cittadellarte, an ongoing centre for contemporary art that offers workshops and artist residencies, and initiates a series of dynamic, socially determined projects. In 1962, Pistoletto began to make his ‘quadri specchianti’ (‘mirror paintings’), reflective stainlesssteel sheets on to which images of ordinary objects or people are applied. The viewer is reflected in the image and ‘enters into’ his paintings through this device. The paintings are never static, but change over time, depending on who is in front of them, and thus his artwork takes on a quality of life – with its changing flux of events.

Ana Prvacki’s works take the form of varied projects and enterprises that draw on performance, consumer aesthetics and popular style to investigate our increasingly dematerialised economy of services and ideas. In 2003, Prvacki founded Ananatural Production, an innovation and lifestyle consultancy combining conceptual concerns, contemporary issues and various modes of communication to distribute ideas, recipes and instructions for various types of experience. Prvacki’s installations are often participatory, promoting and providing products and services to the audience, such as money laundering in The Money Mountain (2008), where she ‘washed’ people’s paper money. For the Sydney Biennale, Prvacki explores the provision of a service – eliminating pain. She plays and practises her flute to generate saliva. Through a simple alchemical process, the saliva is collected and transmuted into a special, music-derived painkiller.

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Michelangelo pistoletto La capriola, 1962–2007 Collection Cittadellarte-fondazione pistoletto, biella

ana prvacki saliva salve wet wipes, 2008 Courtesy the artist

Since the mid-1970s, Julie Rrap has worked with photography, painting, sculpture, performance and video in an ongoing project concerned with representations of the body. Often using her own body as the subject, many of Rrap’s works explore traditional representations of the female nude in art history and popular culture. Her sculpture for the Sydney Biennale is a subversion of western artistic traditions and the gender politics they reflect. Traditionally the sculptural bust was dedicated to men of importance and heroic stature, while the female nude celebrated the erotic other. BUST(ED) (2008) exposes and inverts these relationship: an upside-down silicon nude squats atop a black granite cube reminiscent of Manzoni’s Socle du Monde (1961) in which the world becomes inverted on a plinth. (See an image of the Manzoni work at Artspace.) BUST(ED) is a ‘head stone’ that inverts death by exposing the fleshy underside of life.

Julie rrap BusT(ed), 2008 Courtesy the artist; roslyn oxley9 gallery, sydney; and arc one gallery, Melbourne

2008 biennale of sydney guide

nteMporary art artists MuseuM of Co natasCha sadr haghighian

sharMila saMant

vivan sundaraM

born 1967 in tehran, iran lives and Works in berlin, gerMany

born 1967 in MuMbai, india lives and Works in MuMbai

Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s works take many different forms, including video, film, websites, photography, research, sound and events. In I can’t work like this (2007), Sadr Haghighian invokes the response of an imagined worker to an impossible task. A single sentence is constructed from nails hammered into a gallery wall. The nails are bent, protruding, and some lie discarded on the ground alongside two hammers, as if the workers have just exited. The space between the nails spells out the distressed statement ‘I can’t work like this’ in a seemingly purposeless gesture yet anarchistic fantasy. Tower (2008) is a site-specific sound installation created for the location of a former searchlight tower on Cockatoo Island that was painted over by activists in the colours of the Aboriginal flag over a decade ago. At the tower, a leftover from the island’s military past, the sounds of cracking and crunching wood are heard, as in the moment just before a tree is felled.

Sharmila Samant has created a tribute to the agrarian crisis in India and to its victims. In three parts – Against the Grain, Sounds of the Silenced and Gilt – Samant evokes the plight and experience of afflicted farmers, while also creating a cycle of collaboration and exchange. Against the Grain is a field of handcrafted cobras woven from grain and bamboo, made in collaboration with the Devguniya, an Indigenous community from Bolangir, and representing destruction in the place of bounty. In Sounds of the Silenced, a soundscape has been created using seed-storage barrels collected from across India and refashioned into resonance chambers for the songs sung by women in the fields. The final element of the work, Gilt, will take place at the conclusion of the exhibition. The rice sculptures from the work will be auctioned, with proceeds returning to afflicted communities.

born 1943 in shiMla, hiMaChal pradesh, india lives and Works in neW delhi, india

natascha sadr haghighian I can’t work like this, 2007 Courtesy the artist and Johann könig, berlin

sharmila samant Against the Grain, 2008 Courtesy the artist

2008 biennale of sydney guide

Vivan Sundaram responds to contemporary politics with radical art works. He began as a painter in the late 1960s and became, in the early 1990s, the first artist in India to explore installation art. For the Sydney Biennale, Sundaram exhibits photographs from his new project, Trash, and the video Turning. These works are based on a miniature city made of garbage that Sundaram created in his studio for the purpose of taking the photographs and making the video. Based on the economy and aesthetics of secondhand goods and urban waste, Trash looks at the social implications of waste, at the core of which is the frenzy of global consumption. In Barricade, there are jammed edifices both frail and monumental, neverending stretches of landfill, and homes flattened by bulldozers and risen again.

vivan sundaram Barricade with red Beam, 2008 (detail) Courtesy the artist

eMporary art artists MuseuM of Con Miroslav tiChÝ

other artists at the MCa

born 1926 in nétĉiCe, Moravia, CzeCh republiC lives and Works in kyJov, CzeCh republiC

allora & calzadilla

Pierre huYghe

Jennifer allora born 1974 in philadelphia, usa

born 1962 in paris, franCe lives and Works in paris

guillerMo Calzadilla

isidore isou

born 1971 in havana, Cuba

born 1925 in botosani, roMania died 2007 in paris, franCe

Miroslav Tichý lives in the little town of Kyjov in Moravia, in what was once Czechoslovakia and today is the Czech Republic. He attended art school in Prague from 1945 to 1948 when, following the Communist takeover, he was dismissed from school; he returned to his parental home after his military service in 1950, never to leave again. A rebel and anti-conformist, he also spent years in prison and mental hospitals, a typical series of events for any non-productive radical in Eastern Europe at the time. Since the 1960s, and more frequently from the 1970s onward (but much less today in his old-age) Tichý has been taking photographs using a wide array of home-made cameras that he builds himself. Their graininess, greyish tones, materiality and markings, as well as the blur of the depicted scenes and the ‘bad’ cropping, celebrate imperfection and failure.

live and Work in san Juan, puerto riCo chris burden born 1946 in boston, usa lives and Works in topanga, usa John cage born 1912 in los angeles, usa died 1992 in neW york City, usa alexander calder born 1898 in philadelphia, usa died 1976 in neW york City, usa agusTín vícTor casasola

Man raY born 1890 in philadelphia, usa died 1976 in paris, franCe Mario Merz born 1925 in Milan, italy died 2003 in turin, italy lászló MoholY-nagY born 1895 in bàCs-borsod, hungary died 1946 in ChiCago, usa giusePPe Penone

born 1874 in MexiCo City, MexiCo died 1938 in MexiCo City

born 1947 in garessio, Cuneo, italy lives and Works in paris, franCe and turin, italy

guY debord

georgY PeTrusov

born 1931 in paris, franCe died 1994 in ChaMpot, franCe

born 1903 in rostov-na-donu, russia died 1971 in MosCoW, russia

desTinY deacon and virginia fraser

aleksandr rodchenko

destiny deaCon born 1957 in Maryborough, australia

born 1891 in st petersburg, russia died 1956 in MosCoW, russia

virginia fraser

hans schabus

born in Melbourne

born 1970 in WatsChig, austria lives and Works in vienna, austria

live and Work in Melbourne olafur eliasson born 1967 in Copenhagen, denMark lives and Works in berlin, gerMany rodneY grahaM born 1949 in MatsQui, Canada lives and Works in vanCouver, Canada

lawrence weiner born 1940 in bronx, usa lives and Works in neW york City, usa and aMsterdaM, the netherlands gil JosePh wolMan born 1929 in paris, franCe died 1995 in paris

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Miroslav tichý Mt.inv.no. 7 - 11 - 50, untitled, date unknown Courtesy the foundation tichý oceán, zurich

2008 biennale of sydney guide

nteMporary art events MuseuM of Co bookings and inforMation: (02) 9245 2484 or WWW.MCa.CoM.au/events for sChool prograMs: (02) 9245 2484 or eduCation@MCa.CoM.au

events at the MCa tours

artist perforManCes

dailY guided Tours Weekdays 11 aM & 1 pM, Weekends 12 noon & 1.30 pM free

TonY schwensen FundRazoR (FuCK You PaY me) oR Who Gets to sit at the PointY end oF the Plane? tuesday 17 June, 12–8 pM Wednesday 18 June, 10 aM–5 pM

five-MinuTe sPoTlighT Tours Weekdays 3 pM free

Artist Tony Schwensen hosts a sausage sizzle outside the MCA as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to raise funds to assist in realising artists’ projects for the 2010 Biennale of Sydney.

floor Talk: carolYn chrisTov-bakargiev Wednesday 2 July, 2.30–3.30 pM

2008 Biennale of Sydney Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev discusses the theme of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney in relation to the works on display. free

artist talks and Conversations

free

dora garcía What a FuCKinG WondeRFul audienCe Wednesday 18 June & 9 July, 2.30 pM saturday 28 June, 26 July, 9 august & 30 august, 2.30 pM

Produced by artist Dora García, these tours of some of the key works of the Biennale focus on the behaviour of exhibition audiences. free

aTTilla csörgő

saturday 21 June, 2 pM

geoffreY farMer

saturday 21 June, 2.40 pM

anawana haloba

sunday 22 June, 12.40 pM

ana Prvacki

saturday 21 June, 1.20 pM

Julie rraP

sunday 22 June, 2 pM

naTascha sadr haghighian sunday 22 June, 3.20 pM sharMila saManT

ana Prvacki musiC deRived Pain KilleR friday 20 June, 3–5 pM

Observe artist Ana Prvacki practising her flute playing. Through a simple alchemical process, the saliva Prvacki produces during this practice is collected and transformed into a special music-derived pain killer. free

saturday 21 June, 12.40 pM

free

sharMila saManT Gilt, 2008 saturday 6 septeMber, 3–4.30 pM

Pierre huYghe in conversaTion wiTh carolYn chrisTovbakargiev, arTisTic direcTor of The 2008 biennale of sYdneY thursday 10 July, 5.30 pM

Biennale artist Sharmila Samant’s field of snake sculptures made from rice husks reflects upon environmental and economic hardships faced by Indian rice farmers. At the conclusion of the exhibition the sculptures will be auctioned, with proceeds returning to afflicted communities.

Artist Pierre Huyghe discusses the thoughts and processes behind his work, including his major new project for the Sydney Biennale The Valley Obscured by Clouds at the Sydney Opera House.

free (a reserve of $100 applies at the auCtion)

free

2008 biennale of sydney guide

eMporary art events MuseuM of Cont refer to pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues

keynote leCtures and ConferenCes

events

The 2008 lloYd rees MeMorial lecTure inTernaTional archiTecTure lecTure: dan grahaM friday 20 June, 6.30–8 pM

revoluTionarY readings every saturday during the biennale, 3.30 pM

One of the most prominent conceptual artists of the 1960s to today, New York based artist Dan Graham has run a gallery, published articles as artworks, explored performance and film, and bridged art and architecture in his critical practice. Presented with assistance from Arts NSW in association with the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and the Biennale of Sydney. $15/$10 MCA and RAIA Members and Concessions Bookings essential: (02) 9245 2484

Biennales in dialoGue foruM keYnoTe lecTure: roberT sTorr friday 11 July, 6–7.30 pM

Curator of the 2007 Venice Biennale, Robert Storr presents a lecture focusing on issues, of critique and context relating to the rapidly developing environment of biennales and triennials, which face numerous challenges of economic, global, political and sociocultural change. Robert Storr’s visit has been supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body. free

Readings from artists, curators and writers relating to Revolutions – Forms That Turn. free

live @ Mca Celebrates the biennale of sydney this Winter. hip hop and kruMp danCers, and dJs interpret the theMes of reVoLuTIoNs – forMs ThAT TurN through danCe Moves and dJ teChniQues. hiP hoP & kruMP dance PerforMance sunday 20 July, 2–4 pM

In this live demonstration, dancers relate movement to the themes of the Biennale of Sydney through the dynamic styles of hip hop and Krump dance. free hiP hoP & kruMP dance workshoPs sunday 27 July hip hop 12–2 pM, kruMp 2.30–4.30 pM

Conducted by Darrio Phillips, one of the originators of hip hop dance in Australia, these workshops teach many of the foundation moves of hip hop dance and Krump, as well as free-style skills and more. $25/$20 MCA Members and Concessions Bookings essential: (02) 9245 2484

Bookings essential: (02) 9245 2484 dJ workshoP sunday 3 august, 12–4 pM research workshoP and conference: aTelier bow-wow and dan grahaM BiRth oF the FamilY home in the suBuRBs oF BiG Cities in JaPan, austRalia and the easteRn Coast oF ameRiCa, 2008 thursday 19 June bus trip: 9.30 aM–12 noon ConferenCe: 12 noon–2.30 pM

Artist Dan Graham adopts the role of professor, and members of the architectural studio Atelier Bow-Wow play his students, in this workshop session that presents their findings about typical housing styles in Sydney’s suburbs and how their evolution compares to those of Japan and New Jersey.

This crash course provides a solid grounding for any budding DJ. Instructing beginners with hip hop knowledge, practical demonstrations, and valuable tips from beat mixing to scratching. Equipment provided. $45/$35 MCA Members and Concessions Bookings essential: (02) 9245 2484

free

Bookings essential: ‘What’s on’ www.bos2008.com

2008 biennale of sydney guide

teMporary art events MuseuM of Co refer to pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues weekend arT sessions saturday 16 august or sunday 17 august, 1–3 pM

arT revoluTions: faMilY workshoP tuesday 15 July, 10.30 aM–12.30 pM

Explore the diversity of the MCA’s winter exhibitions with an afternoon of art activities in the gallery spaces. Led by artists, activities include drawing, collage and multimedia works. Suitable for a range of ages and artistic abilities. All materials provided.

Explore the Biennale with art activities for the whole family. Materials and morning tea provided.

Adult $10, Student $8, Child under 12 $5 MCA Members: Adult $8, Student $6, Child under 12 $3 Discount of $2 per head for groups of 4+ Bookings essential: (02) 9245 2484 lord MaYor’s coMMuniTY access daY saturday 23 august, 10 aM–4.30 pM MCa events at 11 aM & 2 pM

Lord Mayor’s Community Access Day is a day-long event that opens up the exhibition’s key themes and artworks for people with disabilities and their carers. A free bus is available between the three venues. See page 94 for full event schedule. At the MCA, Curator Christine Morrow leads AUSLAN-interpreted and audio-described tours between 11 am and 2 pm. Presented by the Biennale of Sydney, the City of Sydney, Accessible Arts, Pier 2/3, Museum of Contemporary Art and Public Programs 2008 Art Gallery of New South Wales. AUSLAN interpreters from Deaf Society of NSW. Audio describers from Vision Australia. free

Information and bookings through Accessible Arts: (02) 9251 6499 (ext 6) or amclaren@aarts.net.au

kids and faMilies arT revoluTions: school holidaY workshoPs tuesday 8 July (5–7 year olds) 10.30 aM–1 pM Wednesday 9 July (8–11 year olds) 10.30 aM–1 pM thursday 10 July (teenagers) 10.30 aM–1 pM

$20 Adult/$15 MCA Members $15 Child/$12 MCA Members $12 per head for groups of 4+/$10 MCA Members Bookings essential: (02) 9245 2484 Mca arT babY tuesday 1 July, 10–11.30 aM thursday 7 august, 10–11.30 aM tuesday 2 septeMber, 2–3.30 pM

MCA’s unique program for parents and carers with babies returns. Join MCA and Biennale staff for lively one-hour guided exhibition tours, followed by coffee and biscuits in the MCA Café. Strollers and prams welcome. $12/$10 MCA Members (babies free) Bookings essential: (02) 9245 2484

youth biennale bella workshoPs Monday–friday 1–5 septeMber 10–11.30 aM or 12.30–2 pM

Bella is the MCA’s pioneering art education program for groups of 5 to 18 year olds with specific needs. As a special Biennale event, Bella workshops are running during the last week of the exhibition with hands-on activities tailored to suit participants’ needs. Bella was established in 1993 and continues through the generosity of longstanding MCA patrons Dr Edward and Mrs Cynthia Jackson, in memory of their late daughter Belinda. free

Bookings essential: (02) 9245 2484

Discover the Biennale with art activities responding to the themes of turning, twisting, inverting and mirroring. Led by artists, these fun workshops start with an exhibition tour, followed by activities ranging from drawing games to sculpture. Materials and morning tea provided. $30/$20 MCA Members Bookings essential: (02) 9245 2484

2008 biennale of sydney guide

eMporary art events MuseuM of Cont refer to pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues

generaTionexT

generationext connects teenagers with current conversations in contemporary art and culture through after-hours social events linked to MCA exhibitions. No teachers, no parents! Fully supervised by MCA staff, and designed with input from the generationext Youth Committee. Supported by the Balnaves Foundation sunday 29 June, 5.30–7.30 pM or sunday 3 august, 5.30–7.30 pM (repeat event)

This winter, generationext features four floors of contemporary art, live music, breakers, hip hop DJs, art-based competitions, food and mocktails – all inspired by the concept for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Revolutions – Forms That Turn. free

Bookings essential by the Thursday before each event: (02) 9241 7196 or generationext@mca.com.au YouTh guides gallerY Tours saturday 16 august & sunday 17 august, 11 aM & 3.30 pM

As a special event for the Biennale, MCA has trained members of the generationext Youth Committee as gallery guides, to give a unique perspective on the exhibition. Join them for a lively and informative 20-minute tour over the weekend. free

sChools and eduCation Teacher evenTs professional developMent serviCes to support k–12 teaChers in preparing Class exCursions to the MCa and exhibition-linked prograMs baCk in the ClassrooM.

Teachers’ Tour: exclusive insighTs inTo cockaToo island and Pier 2/3 for high school Teachers Meet at pier 2/3 inforMation desk saturday 28 June, 10 aM

Bookings essential: ‘What’s on’ www.bos2008.com sChool itineraries available froM WWW.bos2008.CoM/page/ sChools.htMl

student events Mca biennale of sYdneY secondarY sTudY Morning tuesday 29 July, 10 aM–1 pM

An in-depth insight into the curatorial approaches behind the 16th Biennale of Sydney with the Biennale’s Public Program and Education Manager Dr Dougal Phillips and artists, followed by challenging and revealing MCA Educator-led tours. Students $15, Teachers free Bookings essential: (02) 9245 2484 or education@mca.com.au

resourCes

biennale of sYdneY Teacher Preview Monday 23 June, 5.30–8 pM

Teachers are invited to liaise with colleagues, collect resources, and explore key themes and approaches behind the 16th Biennale of Sydney with Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Public Program and Education Manager Dr Dougal Phillips. Including talks by participating Biennale artists. Refreshments provided.

Revolutions – FoRms that tuRn free exhibiTion resources online educaTion kiT

This kit for K–12 teachers investigates key artists, artworks and themes in the exhibition, with images, questions and activities. Available from www.bos2008. com or www.mca.com.au.

free

Bookings essential: (02) 9245 2484 or education@mca.com.au

2008 biennale of sydney guide

teMporary art events MuseuM of Co refer to pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues sTudenT newsPaPer

focus on PhoTograPhic and digiTal Media

A stimulus resource for Years 9–12 Visual Arts students looking at selected Biennale artists’ practice relating to the key exhibition themes. Available at all venues.

A tour and discussion of the photographic, video and digital media works in the Biennale of Sydney and/or Video Logic. Level: Years 10–12

PriMarY class PrograMs

The MCA’s exhibition-linked programs for K–6 students are designed to enhance art appreciation and artmaking skills, with discussion and practical activities. Bookings essential. beginner’s guide To conTeMPorarY arT

What is contemporary art, and what does it mean? Why is it art? This 90-minute* program of discussion and artmaking activities is suitable for all levels and abilities. Level: Years K–6 *MCA suggests a one-hour program for K–2 students Young criTics

Following a guided tour through the Biennale of Sydney, students become art reviewers with discussion, role play and writing activities. The best reviews will be published on the MCA’s website. Level: Years 4–6 secondarY class PrograMs

MCA has developed a range of 90-minute syllabus-linked theoretical or artmaking programs examining artist’s practice, art production and the role of the museum. Program details and exhibition focus can be tailored to suit class requirements.

ongoing

The MCA offers 90-minute programs with exhibition viewings and syllabus-linked discussion to engage students in ideas about art production, artist’s practice, the Frames and the Conceptual Framework. Programs can be combined or tailored to suit class needs. Level: Years 7–12

PosTModernisM

Investigate artists’ use of appropriation and irony, and the way they challenge patterns of authority and call into question art world systems.

The role of The conTeMPorarY MuseuM – arTisT/arTwork/ audience/world

Use the MCA as a case study to examine the place of museums in contemporary culture, looking at the role of collections, exhibitions, artists, curators, critics and audiences.

analYsing visual TexTs for Years 11 and 12 english or visual arTs sTudenTs

A challenging and revealing program introducing methods to ‘unpack’ and interpret visual texts in current exhibitions.

case sTudY: Revolutions – FoRms that tuRn

An in-depth examination of the curatorial intention, key themes and featured artists in the 2008 Biennale of Sydney at the MCA. Level: Years 11 and 12 beginner’s guide To conTeMPorarY arT

The Biennale for beginners. Explore what contemporary art is, what it can mean, why it is art, and what the artist’s intention is, with discussion and optional practical artmaking. An ideal introduction to visual arts in a contemporary museum context. Level: Years 7–12

2008 biennale of sydney guide

sChools and eduCation group bookings:

Bookings in advance are essential for self-guided and MCA Educator-led groups. For further details contact MCA Learning: (02) 9245 2484 or education@mca.com.au

se sydney opera house sydney opera

sydney opera house bennelong point open daily CheCK www.bos2008.Com for performanCe details

Courtesy of sydney opera house trust

ph: (02) 9250 7777 sydneyoperahouse.Com

2008 biennale of sydney guide

house sydney opera house sydney o dora garCía born 1965 in Valladolid, spain liVes and worKs in brussels, belgium

Sydney Opera House was the inaugural venue for the first Biennale of Sydney in 1973 when we participated as part of the opening celebrations. A World Heritage Listed architectural icon, Sydney Opera House is one of the world’s busiest performing arts centres. More than 1600 performances a year feature everything from ballet, opera, drama and symphonic music, through to outstanding contemporary music, comedy, cabaret, dance, theatre, physical theatre, exhibitions and late-night events.

Just because everything is different it does not mean that anything has changed, 2008 sydney opera house, studio performanCe date: 6.30–7.30 pm 19 june 2008

García uses the exhibition space as a platform to investigate the relationship between the visitor, the artwork and the place. To this end, she often draws on participation and performance. Through minimal changes, the exhibition space is converted into a different experience for each visitor, who leaves it with his or her perceptions altered, or at least with a degree of scepticism and doubt. The stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, one of the most fascinating and tragic personalities of the revolutionary sixties, visited

Sydney on 6 September 1962. He was able to deliver only a onesentence performance: after saluting the public with the words: ‘What a fucking wonderful audience!’ he was promptly arrested on the grounds of obscenity. Richard Neville, a young Australian who would become the guru of London’s counterculture, saw this brief performance and, understanding the importance of Bruce’s position within the generational revolution that was about to start, attempted to organise a new performance at the University of New South Wales. The Australian authorities would not allow Bruce to perform and he was asked to leave the country, never to return. García has imagined the performance that never took place and, for the Biennale of Sydney 2008, ‘lets’ Lenny Bruce finally speak in Sydney.

entranCe to studio

entranCe to ConCert hall

dora garcia Cover for Frieze Fanzine, 2007 from Just because everything is different it does not mean that anything has changed, 2007 Courtesy the artist and frankfurter Kunstverein, frankfurt

2008 biennale of sydney guide

se sydney opera house sydney opera pierre huyghe born 1962 in paris, franCe liVes and worKs in paris the valley obscured by clouds: a world without metaphor sydney opera house, ConCert hall performanCe dates: 12 noon 9 july – 12 noon 10 july 2008 made possible through the generous support of the ellipse foundation – Contemporary art Collection, portugal and marian goodman gallery, new york and paris. presented by the biennale of sydney (2008) in association with the sydney opera house

In the Opera House Concert Hall, a forest of trees has strangely grown. The forest is on the stage, in the stalls, in the circles. From midday on 9 July to midday on 10 July, Huyghe creates a unique and magical experience, with no beginning and no end, no division between stage and audience, no specified direction or path to take – it is a theatre liberated from rules. You are in a ghostly, in-between reality with a soothing, phantasmagoric quality. The light is that of dawn, and mist covers the lower part of the hall and the stage. From the entrance

at the top of the hall, you see a valley obscured by clouds. Someone is walking between the trees and singing. Her lyrics draw the audience, who are wearing headlights, into the forest. Her song tells of how to find a way out. By tracing the experience from the Concert Hall back to the nurseries and the growers of the trees, back to a real place elsewhere, the song teaches us how to reach a special place in an Australian forest. Huyghe has been creating a variety of artworks and collaborative projects since the early 1990s. Interested in the exhibition as a location where potential new realities can emerge, in the freedom of non-productive actions, in the layering of interpretations, both real and fictional, and in experience as a territory of infinite possible narratives, Huyghe’s practice has earned him a reputation as one of the most experimental artists of his generation. Evident in his works is a recurring desire to introduce

pleasure, play and childhood fantasy into art, and the impulse to consider art as a landscape in which to make manifest the way people can, and do, react to the homogenising attempts embedded in consumer culture by encouraging the dynamic reconstruction of their everyday lives and rituals. In 2001, Huyghe was awarded a Golden Lion for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The following year, he participated in Documenta 11 in Kassel. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Museo Serralves, Oporto (1999); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2001); Kunsthaus, Bregenz (2002); Dia Art Foundation, New York (2003); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2004); and ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Tate Modern, London (2006). The Valley Obscured by Clouds: A world without metaphor has been produced with assistance from CulturesfranCe, the embassy of france in australia, lumens arte, rent-a-garden (terrey hills) and the technical direction Company of aust (tdC)

Courtesy ia Connections sydney australia photograph: s. oost

2008 biennale of sydney guide

house sydney opera house sydney o

monteverde Cloud forest, Costa rica photograph: michael fogden. Courtesy the international Canopy network www. evergreen.edu/ican

2008 biennale of sydney guide

s/the domain royal botaniC gardens

Sydneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exquisite Royal Botanic Gardens, located in the heart of the city, offer an abundance of wonderful flora framed by dramatic views of Sydney Harbour and the Opera House. For the perfect way to experience the Biennale, take the Vittoria Biennale ArtWalk and discover two iconic works as you stroll through the Gardens and Domain.

destiny deaCon and Virginia fraser

giuseppe penone

photograph: jaime plaza, botanic gardens trust

2008 biennale of sydney guide

s/the domain royal botaniC gardens/ destiny deaCon

giuseppe penone

born 1957 in maryborough, australia

born 1947 in garessio, Cuneo, italy liVes and worKs in paris, franCe and turin, italy

born in melbourne liVe and worK in melbourne

Melbourne-based artists Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser worked collaboratively to create a provocative installation in the Gardens. The artists modified an existing ‘Freedom Camping Family Tourer’ canvas tent that the viewer can look into, by adding artificial light, fans and a series of sculptural figures they call ‘ravers’ made of inflated nylon tubes. The movement of air created by the fans causes the turbulent creatures to rise, fall and thrash around inside the tent, producing a rushing noise. These symbolic rebels express the unease of feeling ‘occupied’ – physical occupation, political occupation, occupied as a warning sign meaning ‘don’t come in’, mental occupation (preoccupation, thought, fantasy, dreams, delusions) and supernatural occupation (possession and haunting).

mrs maCquaries road open daily 7 am–5 pm (sunset) ph: (02) 9231 8111 www.rbgsyd.nsw.goV.au

(See pages 46 and 73 for more.)

destiny deacon and Virginia fraser Occupied, 2008 Courtesy the artists and roslyn oxley9 gallery, sydney

2008 biennale of sydney guide

bCdr

(See page 46 for more.)

royal botanic gardens/ the domain

Giuseppe Penone explores the relationship between nature and culture by making sculptures and installations that are based on a variety of means and materials. Interested in transformation and change as fundamental characteristics of life, Penone became one of the key arte povera artists in the late 1960s. These artists used poor materials and natural processes to focus on energy and a non-anthropomorphic view of the world, where human beings are only a part of a broader universe. For the Sydney Biennale, Penone has created an eight-metre-high sculpture that appears to be an ordinary, beautiful tree. However, it is made of bronze, and in its branches a large stone has been caught. It looks, at first glance, like an upside-down tree, with its roots wrapped around a large stone.

Virginia fraser

giuseppe penone Idee di pietra, 2004–07 Courtesy the artist and marian goodman gallery, new york and paris

23 26 28 ales art gallery of n A major venue of the Biennale of Sydney since 1976, the 16th Biennale will see more than 50 artists featured at the Gallery. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t miss Art After Hours every Wednesday evening throughout the exhibition

2008 biennale of sydney guide

8 29 30 31 new south wales art art gallery of new south wales art gallery road the domain open daily 10 am–5 pm wednesday until 9 pm

winning restaurant, extensive bookstore and a program of over 30 temporary exhibitions a year with many free events, the Gallery is a great destination to explore. Visit on Wednesday evenings until 9 pm for Art After Hours – an entertaining program of celebrity talks, tours, film and music.

photograph: Christopher snee for agnsw

ph: (02) 9225 1744 www.artgallery.nsw.goV.au

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. Over one million visitors a year enjoy its permanent collection of Australian, Aboriginal, European, Asian and contemporary art. With an award-

2008 biennale of sydney guide

w south wales plans art gallery of ground floor

nedKo solaKoV

gordon matta-ClarK miChael raKowitz

dan perjoVsChi (faÇade)

bruCe nauman entranCe

dan perjoVsChi (faÇade)

gordon bennett

shop

thomas boCK ross gibson balang KubarrKu tommy mcrae james angus

dan perjoVsChi

2008 biennale of sydney guide

new south wales plans art gallery lower leVel one

riChard larter pushwagner destiny deaCon and Virginia fraser

ranbir KaleKa atsuKo tanaKa

thomas bayrle luigi russolo ViKtor Vasarely

Kasimir maleViCh lia perjoVsChi

yVes Klein piero manzoni saburo muraKami jean tinguely

yVes Klein

franCis alĹ¸s

bari Kumar marCel duChamp Klara liden dan graham gianni Colombo mario & marisa merz jesĂşs rafael soto slaVKo tiheC

stuart ringholt

len lye

gianni Colombo

peter fisChli / daVid weiss marK dion

rebeCCa horn jannis Kounellis len lye

miChael snow joseph beuys adolf luther raquel ormella

hans bellmer Carolee sChneemann

adrian piper

lift

tim lee

eduCation hub

renata luCas

ayreen anastas and rene gabri robert smithson pushwagner yoKo ono

giulio paolini

2008 biennale of sydney guide

south wales artists art gallery of franCis alÿs

ayreen anastas

JaMes angus

born 1959 in antwerP, belgiuM lives and works in MexiCo City, MexiCo and london, uk

born in bethleheM, Palestine

born 1970 in Perth, australia lives and works in new york City, usa and sydney, australia

A compulsive wanderer and a storyteller, Francis Alÿs is known for his projects in a wide range of media, including painting, photography, performance and video. Many of his works involve observation and recording of the social, cultural and economic conditions of particular places, usually conceived during walks through urban areas. Yet they are also playful and poetic. In Choques (2005-06), the artist records different perspectives on the same incident – a man trips as he walks down the street. Filmed from nine different points of view and displayed on separate monitors throughout the space, the fragments we witness can only be perceived individually and at different moments during our walk through the exhibition galleries.

born in tehran, iran

francis alÿs Choques, 2005–06 Courtesy the artist and galerie Peter kilchmann, Zurich

rene gabri live and work in new york and other PlaCes

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri work together. Anastas writes in fragments, and makes films and videos. She is interested in philosophy, literature, the political and the everyday. Gabri is interested in the complex mechanisms that constitute the world. He works within the folds of cultural practice, social thought and politics. They are both involved in 16 Beaver (16beavergroup.org). They were commissioned to produce Camp Campaign – a 45-day journey across the United States in 2006 which attempted to address the internment camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by connecting it to various contemporary and historic sites of ‘juridical exception’ in the USA. For the Biennale, the artists proposed another trip, more speculative in its content. They have set themselves on the search for a possibility of revolution within Australia. Of course, this revolution may be unlike any we have known before.

ayreen anastas and rene gabri Your Money Produced This Image, 2007 Courtesy the artists

Often derived from experimentation with the geometric coordinates of form, James Angus’s sculptures distort and invert familiar objects – from the natural world to architecture and engineering – revealing new structures and perspectives. Trained as an artist but practising as an automobile designer, Ettore Bugatti revolutionised motor racing in the early twentieth century with the introduction of the Type 35. The sculpture Bugatti Type 35, reengineered 80 years later, represents a shift of the original geometry to the right by 30 degrees. It indicates speed, but all mechanical functionality is lost within ellipses and obliquity. Rendered unstable by a displaced centre of gravity, the entire car leans on its side. It is a literal manifestation of hidden forces and an icon of modernity put to rest.

James angus Bugatti Type 35, 2006 Courtesy the artists and roslyn oxley9 gallery, sydney Photograph: Jenni Carter

2008 biennale of sydney guide

new south wales artists art galler thoMas bayrle born 1937 in berlin, gerMany lives and works in frankfurt, gerMany

gordon bennett born 1955 in Monto, Queensland, australia lives and works in brisbane, australia

Gordon Bennett has developed a reputation since the late 1980s for producing thought-provoking works. For the Biennale, he took the theme Revolutions – Forms That Turn literally and proposed to reposition paintings from the Indigenous collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the colonial painting galleries on the ground level where European painters and Australians of Western descent are represented. The paintings they would replace were to be moved down to the Indigenous galleries of Yiribana. He also proposed to turn all the relocated paintings upside down. The proposal was an attempt to eliminate separations within the museum and disrupt the gallery’s established collecting and exhibiting policy. It was rejected by the museum. A scale replica of the galleries with miniatures of the artworks are all that is left of Bennett’s challenging and revolutionary artistic dream – a proposal for a future potential re-hang of the museum’s collections.

German artist Thomas Bayrle’s work is characterised by minute repetitions of figures mimetised within larger figures, so that the visual patterning he achieves makes it impossible to clearly discern the figures in a field of dizzy kinetic visuality. For the Biennale of Sydney, he has created a wallpaper and a series of more or less visible portraits of the notorious Venezuelan terrorist of the 1970s known as ‘Carlos’. During the search for German RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) members, international terrorism increased and developed strategies for achieving secrecy that were ‘out of the grid’. ‘Carlos’ was one of these terrorists, constantly changing his identity to avoid capture. His activities were anarchistic and individualistic, as opposed to the collective nature of the RAF group. These portraits were made in 1977, the same year a film about ‘Carlos’ came out and the year of the German ‘Red Autumn’ – filled with terrorist attacks and culminating in the presumed suicide of members of the RAF in prison.

Thomas Bayrle’s visual patterning makes it impossible to clearly discern the figures in a field of dizzy kinetic visuality.

thomas bayrle Carlos, 1977 Courtesy galerie barbara weiss, berlin

2008 biennale of sydney guide

gordon bennett Settler and Shadow Reflection, 1993 Courtesy the artist and Milani gallery, brisbane Photograph: John o’brien

south wales artists art gallery of JosePh beuys

gianni ColoMbo

MarCel duChaMP

born 1921 in krefeld, gerMany died 1986 in düsseldorf, gerMany

born 1937 in Milan, italy died 1993 in MelZo, italy

born 1887 in blainville, franCe died 1968 in neuilly-sur-seine, franCe

Joseph Beuys was one of the most revolutionary artists of the sixties and seventies. For Beuys, art and activism were inseparable. According to his radical notion of free democratic socialism and ecology, every person was potentially an artist able to transform society creatively. In 1970 he founded the Organisation for Direct Democracy by Referendum in Düsseldorf, Beuys became a charismatic leader. The transformation of society itself, and the set of relations between people to achieve that, was a new form of sculpture, a ‘social sculpture’. When he was invited to Documenta in Kassel in 1972, Beuys transferred the Organisation’s office to the museum gallery for the duration of the three-month exhibition. During these meetings/performances, Beuys would annotate his thoughts through diagrams on blackboards. Today, these blackboards are among Beuys’ most important works, as they illustrate formally and conceptually his revolutionary thought processes and the importance of dialogue and discussion as an artform.

Gianni Colombo was one of the most important Kinetic artists – a movement based on early twentiethcentury futurist tendencies which developed internationally during the 1950s. Kinetic Art explored the possibility of art in movement as a revolutionary artform that would allow for active participation of viewers, no longer simply kept in the role of passive spectators. Kinetic artists such as Colombo and Jesus Rafael Soto, also exhibited in the Biennale, were utopian and visionary; they saw artistic practice as part of an attempt to revolutionise daily life through perceptual freedom and the emancipation of the senses – feeling ourselves feeling. Against the notion of individual authorship, in 1959–60 Colombo founded the Gruppo T, an experimental art collective. He won a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1968 for his Elastic Space (1967), which is presented again for the Biennale of Sydney – a dark room you enter that seems to morph and move around you, expanding and contracting.

Marcel Duchamp was one of the most revolutionary artists of the early twentieth century, when consumer culture was just beginning in Europe. After some years of painting, in 1913 Duchamp turned to experiments with mechanical drawing and notations, and began producing ‘readymades’. He took industrially produced everyday objects, removed them from their usage in daily life, from their cycle of production and consumption, and re-designated them as works of art. The Bicycle Wheel was the first of Duchamp’s readymades. The wheel is mounted upside-down upon a painted wooden stool, forming an iconic image of two functional items transformed into a non-functional art object. The implications of this gesture for artmaking were enormous, foregrounding surrealist assemblages and the gesture of selection as a creative act in itself, paving the way for the conceptual movements of the 1960s to today.

32 64

gianni Colombo Spazio Elastico (Elastic Space), 1967 Courtesy archivio gianni Colombo, Milano

Joseph beuys Unterrichtstafel aus dem Büro für Direkte Demokratie (Blackboard from the Office for Direct Democracy), 1971 Collection adolf-luther-foundation, krefeld, germany

2008 biennale of sydney guide

new south wales artists art galler david weiss born 1946 in ZuriCh, switZerland live and work in ZuriCh

Swiss artists Peter Fischli / David Weiss have been collaborating since the late 1970s. Their photographs, sculptures, installations and moving images explore extraordinary transformations of the commonplace through the radicality of a comic and childlike spirit and love of play. The world of everyday objects is in a precarious balance, and an absurd chain of reactions between different objects colliding and setting off explosions constitutes their most well-known work – the film The Way Things Go (1987). In Sydney, the artists exhibit the series of photographs Equilibres (1984–87) – chance encounters of objects. In these images, gravity seems to work in reverse, creating states of suspension.

2008 biennale of sydney guide

born 1952 in ZuriCh, switZerland

Marcel Duchamp took industrially produced everyday objects, removed them from their usage in daily life, from their cycle of production and consumption, and re-designated them as works of art.

dan grahaM born 1942 in urbana, illinois, usa lives and works in new york City, usa

A prominent conceptual artist since the 1960s, Dan Graham has run a gallery, published articles as artworks, explored performance and film, and bridged art and architecture in his critical practice. In his early films, Graham experimented with perception in an expanded field – what vision does in a situation where the body’s natural faculties are heightened or expanded by the camera lens. In artworks made between 1969 and 1974, the body and the camera become one machine, moving and sensing and seeing – one sees oneself seeing. In Helix / Spiral (1973), there are two performers with cameras filming, one from the ‘outside’ moving in a spiral inwards towards the other performer, and one from the ‘inside’ filming the world while turning the camera around his body in a spiral from head to feet. In Graham’s works, our body is our instrument and compass in a journey through the world.

Peter fisChli

dan graham Helix/Spiral, 1973 Collection Castello di rivoli Museo d’arte Contemporanea, permanent loan fondazione Crt Progetto arte Moderna e Contemporanea

south wales artists art gallery of rebeCCa horn

ranbir kaleka

tiM lee

born 1944 in MiChelstadt, gerMany lives and works in berlin, gerMany

born 1953 in Patiala, PunJab, india lives and works in new delhi, india

born 1975 in seoul, korea lives and works in vanCouver, Canada

Since the beginning of the 1970s, Rebecca Horn has explored sculpture, installation, performance, drawing and film as fields of charged energy. Her visionary and emotionally intense imagery is the result of tremendous precision in the staging of her works – kinetic sculptures that suggest a surrealist legacy. Horn’s machines evoke a magnetic flow of charged energy and a disturbing theatre of obsession, desire and the turbulence of passion. In Cutting Through the Past (1992–93), five old doors are installed on a platform, creating a visionary yet domestic architecture evocative of pain. At the centre of the platform, a pointed metal rod is balanced on a metal stand, which moves on its axis so that the rod continuously rotates through 360°, penetrating at each turn the edges of the doors, as if carving into them with an incisive and cruel gesture, rich with erotic implications.

Since the late 1990s, Indian artist Ranbir Kaleka has been overlaying painting and video on the same plane. His works merge the time and light of the moving image with the constancy and materiality of the painted image. He Was a Good Man (2008) shows a middle-aged man threading a needle. The man is mostly still, intensely focused on the needle which he occasionally attempts to thread, followed by some twitches and jerks in a cycle where the past and the present run into each other in a phantasmagorical flow. At one point the painting on canvas in the installation is lit by the projector light alone, devoid of any video image. In another passage, the illusory depth of the painting is destroyed by the silhouetted flat shadows on the canvas, which confirm its flatness and establish the installation as an artefact before the loop begins again its spell of movement and depth.

Tim Lee works with performative video and photography. Often exploring and undertaking reenactments of important moments in art history or popular culture, Lee’s works are concerned with mirroring, inversion and translation. For the Sydney Biennale, Lee explores Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording and 1981 re-recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Goldberg Variations, suggesting that experimentations that culminate in new standards, with renewed histories, should not remain stable, but should continue to alter themselves over time: living in a state of perpetual flux; constantly shifting and changing; continually, repeatedly and endlessly. Having never played the piano, Lee videorecorded separately his left and right hands playing the composition. After editing the hundreds of short takes together to create a seamless musical montage, the combined left and right channels are presented on two monitors, set side-by-side, in order to complete the stereo illusion of a skilful performance.

ranbir kaleka He Was A Good Man, 2008 Courtesy the artist and bose Pacia, new york Photograph: david flores

tim lee The Goldberg Variations, Aria, BWV 988, 1741, Johann Sebastian Bach (Glenn Gould 1981), 2007 Courtesy the artist

rebecca horn Cutting Through the Past, 1992–93 Collection Castello di rivoli Museum of Contemporary art, rivoli-turin, long-term loan fondazione Marco rivetti Photograph: Paolo Pellion Copyright © rebecca horn. licensed by visCoPy 2008

2008 biennale of sydney guide

new south wales artists art galler Renata Lucas disrupts places to re-activate them, creating interventions into existing architecture that go against common sense, yet are extremely logical.

renata luCas

len lye

born 1971 in ribeirão Preto, braZil lives and works in são Paulo, braZil

born 1901 in ChristChurCh, new Zealand died 1980 in new york, usa

Renata Lucas disrupts places to reactivate them, creating interventions into existing architecture that go against common sense, yet are extremely logical. Her works serve the purpose of opening up spaces of revolt and emancipation by providing a sense of liberation to viewers through participation. Sistema de Falta (‘system of lack’, or ‘system of what is left over’) is her project for the Biennale. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where many historical artworks in the Biennale exhibition are shown, she has detached some of the temporary exhibition walls that now move through the space by hanging on tracks that run along the ceiling. Inspired by the grid system and the lighting tracks of the existing ceiling, her sliding fragments of walls are disconnected; they open up gaps in the exhibition, and transform the entire Biennale exhibition into a ‘form that turns’.

renata lucas Cruzamento (Crossing), 2003 Courtesy the artist and galeria luisa strina, são Paulo Photograph: beto felício

2008 biennale of sydney guide

Len Lye was interested in energy and movement, and began to experiment with the newest medium of his time for producing images – film. He invented ‘direct film’ in 1934–35 – using methods such as scratching, painting, stencilling and generally manipulating directly on to the celluloid, without a camera, to create energetic rhythms and images when projected. He was excited by individuality, living organisms and the wind. He argued for a free and sensual expanding of perception, and a view on life based on living in the ‘here-and-now’. He was also a Kinetic sculptor, and created distinctive works with thin strips of steel that flip and move violently or sensuously, producing ringing metallic sounds and movement filled with passion. Storm King (1964) is one of Lye’s most well known sculptures, while Ribbon Snake (Convolution) (1965) has been reconstructed for the first time since 1965 on the occasion of the Biennale of Sydney.

len lye Ribbon Snake (Convolution), 1965 len lye foundation Collection and archives, govettbrewster art gallery, new Plymouth

south wales artists art gallery of toMMy Mcrae born c. 1835, viCtoria, australia died in 1901 kwatkwat PeoPle

Tommy McRae spent most of his life in the Upper Murray region of New South Wales and Victoria. He was one of the first Indigenous artists to be taught western artistic traditions, such as drawing figures in charcoal on paper. He became a careful observer of the settlers and their habits in his drawings made from the 1860s. McRae’s art offers an early Indigenous perspective on life during the period and illustrates the impact of colonisation from that point of view – the reverse of the dominant western perspective on early settlement in Australia. His roughly drawn figures are often silhouetted and focus on attributes of the settlers, such as their guns or hats, as well as on the positions of groups in a location, rather than on individual singularity.

Piero Manzoni investigated what it means to create an artwork, and ultimately revolutionised our idea of what art is or could be.

Piero ManZoni born 1933 in sonCino, CreMona, italy died 1963 in Milan, italy

Piero Manzoni’s artistic practice developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was based in Milan, founded the experimental magazine and art space Azimuth, and was friends with Yves Klein. Manzoni explored the limits between art and life, the personal and the universal. He investigated what it means to create an artwork, and ultimately revolutionised our idea of what art is or could be. In 1961, Manzoni began to ‘sign’ people as living artworks, releasing a certificate of authenticity for each living sculpture – the Carta d’autenticità. In the same year, he released 90 cans of Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit) as a provocative anti-consumer gesture, as well as a metaphor for the ultimate form of artistic authenticity and sincerity – a true product of the artist. This artist is also exhibiting at Artspace. (See page 85 for more.)

tommy Mcrae Sketch of Squatters by Tommy an upper Murray Aboriginal, 1864 Mitchell library, state library of new south wales, sydney

2008 biennale of sydney guide

new south wales artists art galler Mario MerZ

bruCe nauMan

raQuel orMella

born 1925 in Milan, italy died 2003 in turin, italy

born 1941 in fort wayne, indiana, usa lives and works in galisteo, new MexiCo, usa

born 1969 in sydney, australia lives and works in sydney and Canberra, australia

Bruce Nauman studied mathematics, music and art, and has engaged in philosophy and the study of language. Since the mid-1960s, his highly experimental artworks have posed questions about how we experience the world, and how meaning is constructed through understanding experience. Nauman has created a body of work that extends from painting to photography, from sculpture to video, from performance to the creation of installations and environments. He has constantly analysed paradox, the meaning of art, and the gap that it reveals between theory and practice, knowledge and experience. Presented in the Biennale is one of his most important works, a neon spiral made in 1967 that reads, ‘The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths’.

Raquel Ormella is an installation artist working at the intersections of art and activism. She investigates the means by which critical thought in contemporary art might encourage processes of self-examination regarding political consciousness and social action. She questions the role of the artist in political movements, while at the same time exploring those relations practically in her life. For the Biennale, Ormella develops the use of office equipment by creating an installation of electronic whiteboards, feral animal office (2008), in which she examines the current Wilderness Society Campaign Centers connected to the Wild Rivers Campaign in North Queensland. The Wild Rivers Campaign is an ongoing, complex, multilayered campaign that seeks to protect Australia’s rivers. This is attempted in many ways, including (and in some cases unsuccessfully) forming ties with local Indigenous communities.

Marisa MerZ born 1931 in turin, italy lives and works in turin and Milan, italy

Mario Merz and Marisa Merz are among the most important artists from Italy to emerge in the late 1960s within the context of arte povera – an art movement based on employing everyday techniques to shape humble materials – both natural and artificial – into artworks that generate meaningful experiences. They created installations where the energy fields present in physical states of materials and their processes of transformation are celebrated. Mario Merz often used the spiral in his works as a geometric form representing both expansion and growth, but also repetition and return. Marisa Merz’s work is, by comparison, lyrical, subtle, visionary and private. Mario and Marisa shared a life together, influencing each other’s work.

2008 biennale of sydney guide

(See page 23 for more.)

bruce nauman The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths (Window or wall sign), 1967 Collection: national gallery of australia, Canberra; Purchased 1978 Copyright © bruce nauman/ars. licensed by visCoPy 2008

raquel ormella 130 Davey Street, 2005 Courtesy the artist Photograph: Christian Capurro

south wales artists art gallery of dan PerJovsChi

adrian PiPer

MiChael rakowitZ

born 1961 in sibiu, roMania

born 1948 in harleM, new york City, usa lives and works in berlin, gerMany

born 1973 in new york City, usa lives and works in new york City and ChiCago, usa

lia PerJovsChi born 1961 in sibiu, roMania live and work in buCharest, roMania

Dan and Lia Perjovschi have been making art since 1986. They are sceptics who matured under a dictatorship that ended in 1989 with the Romanian revolution. Dan draws directly on walls, floors and windows in art exhibitions. His humour addresses serious issues – world politics, social life, culture, the relations between the local and the global, and personal concerns. The freedom of critical thinking is crucial to Lia’s practice, which involves recovering, collecting and disseminating information. She is – in sum – a personal alternative to the institutionalisation of knowledge and carries her own portable, emancipated system of knowledge with her. Her history of the world from pre-history to today appears in note form as a reading of ideas in hand-drawn diagrams that touch on history, art theory, politics and language – what she calls a Mind Map (Diagram).

dan Perjovschi Australian Art, 2008 Courtesy dan Perjovschi and lombard-freid Projects, new york

Adrian Piper emerged out of the 1960s’ conceptual art movement in New York. In the 1970s, Piper turned towards a dialectical mix of incisive political engagement informed by her personal experiences. As a light-skinned black woman, Piper was particularly aware of racist, xenophobic and gender prejudices, and many of her works played out racial stereotypes. Into the later 1970s and 1980s Piper’s installations became more complex, with multilayered soundtracks and the use of video, light boxes and found imagery. Black Box/White Box (1992) is an installation featuring two roomsized identical boxes, one painted black, the other white, each showing a different face and experience of the infamous Rodney King incident of March 1991 when four Los Angeles police officers, unaware that they were being recorded on video, ferociously beat a black motorist for two full minutes, causing outrage around the world and triggering serious rioting in the city a year later.

Michael Rakowitz often works collaboratively to create forms of ‘social sculpture’ that address social problems through personal encounters and stories in which poetry and pragmatism meet. For the Biennale, Rakowitz responds to contemporary Indigenous life in Australia and creates new associations with the history of visionary architecture and its failures, and with the collapse of narratives of revolution. In collaboration with a number of individuals and groups, Rakowitz has constructed a full-scale contemporary version of avant-garde Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin’s model for Monument to the Third International (1919). Tatlin’s tower, which was to have been made of spirals, was never built; today, it is a symbol of revolutionary and visionary thought. Rakowitz’s Tatlin tower, White man got no dreaming, is a rebirth of collective hope, as it recycles discarded materials from old houses, soon to be demolished, owned by the Aboriginal Housing Company in Redfern, Sydney.

Michael rakowitz Group 2: Skirted Male with Beard (IM19752), Female Figure with Feet of Child (IM19751) (Recovered, Missing, Stolen Series), 2007 Courtesy the artist and lombard-freid Projects, new york

2008 biennale of sydney guide

new south wales artists art galler stuart ringholt

luigi russolo

Carolee sChneeMann

born 1971 in Perth, australia lives and works in Melbourne, australia

born 1885 in Portogruaro, veniCe, italy died 1947 in Cerro di laveno, varese, italy

born 1939 in fox Chase, Pennsylvania, usa lives and works in new york City, usa

Stuart Ringholt’s work takes many forms, from performance, video and sculpture to collaborative workshops. Personal themes such as mental illness, fear and embarrassment are often represented through absurd situations or quirky and amateur self-help environments. Following a series of actions performed in the public realm, each one intended to cause self-embarrassment – such as having toilet-paper stuck to the rearend of his pants, or walking around with snot in his beard, or chewing a pen while travelling in a train compartment until the ink went all over his face – Ringholt organised Funny Fear Workshop (2004), in which he led a group of people in how to relieve their sense of embarrassment. For the Biennale of Sydney, Ringholt will offer a series of free anger workshops within the gallery space. Ringholt will help participants, whom he requests wear loose clothing, to express their stress and anger in in a dynamic, revolutionary and absurd space.

Luigi Russolo, one of the founders of Italian futurism, wrote The Art of Noises in 1913, in which he expressed his enthusiasm for the birth of a new modern age where everything appeared to move and to take place rapidly. He intentionally wanted to break down the barriers between music and the noises of daily life, and he dreamed of a revolution in society that would move through all forms of sensory perception. In his painting La Rivolta (The Revolt) (1911) the rebels become a single unit, with the city buildings and streets overturned, and prisms of electric lights created. Energy is expressed by means of a succession of acute angles prolonging the composition and seeming to move outwards beyond the limits of the painted canvas. The content depicted – a mass pushing against the city in revolt – determined the formal revolution in the painting: a literal turning upside down of the city. (See page 30 for more.)

Carolee Schneemann’s art ranges from body and performance art to multimedia work and sitespecific installations. She combines references to archaic visual traditions with an exploration of contemporary desires and taboos. A radical feminist, she began as a painter and quickly moved into making assemblages during the early 1960s, which were followed by performance-based work and film. Reflecting on society’s attitudes to gender and sexuality through the use of her own body, Meat Joy (1964) is a film based on the sculptural, rhythmic interlocking of her body. An erotic rite, it is excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes and paper scraps. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic – shifting and turning between tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon: qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous or repellent.

luigi russolo La Rivolta (The Revolt), c. 1911 Collection gemeentemuseum den haag, the hague

Carolee schneemann Meat Joy, 1964 Courtesy the artist Photograph: al giese

(See page 74 for event details.)

stuart ringholt Circle Heads, 2005 Courtesty the artist and anna schwartz gallery: sydney and Melbourne

2008 biennale of sydney guide

south wales artists art gallery of MiChael snow

nedko solakov

atsuko tanaka

born 1929 in toronto, Canada lives and works in toronto

born 1957 in tCherven briag, bulgaria lives and works in sofia, bulgaria

born 1932 in osaka, JaPan died 2005 in nara, JaPan

Michael Snow has experimented in various fields – music, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and film – since the late 1950s. He explores how we see and know the world, the mechanics of vision, and the relations between the technology of viewing and our body’s natural and physical perceptual abilities. One of his most renowned works is the machine-generated film La Région Centrale (1971). Snow had a remote-controlled camera purposebuilt to shoot a landscape in circular movements and at different speeds. The camera could turn upside-down, sideways, in any direction as it filmed. Snow later turned this into a sculpture. In this kinetic installation, titled De La (1969–72), the viewer sees how the camera works as it records the surrounding space and projects the images on monitors in the room. The images in De La depict what one sees of the space that one is in.

Nedko Solakov’s conceptually based installations are radical, witty and ironic. A graduate in mural painting at the Art Academy in Sofia in 1981, Solakov is well known for artworks that consist of apparently empty rooms – the walls, ceiling and floor of which he covers with tiny handwritten comments and narrative annotations that are discernible only close-up, after fully entering the space. One of his life-long artistic projects is A Life (Black & White), which he has been performing over and over since 1999 and presumably will continue to perform forever. It consists of two painters constantly repainting the walls of the exhibition space in black and white for the entire duration of the exhibition. One paints the walls white, while the other paints them black, round and round in an endless loop – perhaps a comment on the futility of too much intentionality in life. A Life (Black & White) is presented in the lobby of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Atsuko Tanaka was a member of the Japanese artist group Gutai, founded in 1954, which advocated action-based art and created radical performative experiments. Tanaka created colourful and dynamic works that explored painting, sculpture, electricity, sound and performance. Her Electric Dress (1956) is a sculpture made of coloured light bulbs that she wore and turned on. In 1956, Tanaka created a sound piece called Work (Bell), which consists of a sequence of ringing sounds that circulate through the exhibition space along the floor, actioned by means of a button that viewers are invited to press. Although there have been experiments by artists in the use of sound since early in the twentieth century, this is one of the first purely sound sculptures to be made by a contemporary artist, as it ‘maps’ the space acoustically for the duration of the exhibition – a revolution in the field of visual art. Tanaka spoke of her Work (Bell) as a landscape painting.

nedko solakov A Life (Black & White), 1998 Courtesy the artist, arndt & Partner berlin/Zurich and the collections of Peter kogler, vienna; susan and lewis Manilow, Chicago; hauser & wirth, st gallen; Museum for Moderne kunst, frankfurt am Main. Photograph: giorgio Colombo

atsuko tanaka Spring 1966, 1966 Courtesy ashiya City Museum of art and history, ashiya City

2008 biennale of sydney guide

new south wales artists art galler Jean tinguely

other artists at the art gallery of new south wales

born 1925 in fribourg, switZerland died 1991 in berne, switZerland

Hans Bellmer

klara liDen

born 1902 in katowiCe, Poland died 1975 in Paris, franCe

born 1979 in stoCkholM, sweden lives and works in stoCkholM and berlin, gerMany

Jean Tinguely was an artist and an anarchist. He believed in movement, freedom, humour, radicality and play. Among the first Kinetic sculptors to emerge in Europe during the period after the Second World War, he began creating mechanical, motorised sculptures – combining found scraps of metal with new materials – in the mid-1950s. For Tinguely, art was revolutionary and revolution was art; he expressed this by developing a series of sculptures that he literally blew up. In the face of a world that had invented – and used – such terrifying killing machines as the atomic bomb, Tinguely advocated instead for antiwar machines, machines of freedom. On 17 March 1960, in the garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a huge sculpture of his was partially destroyed in a staged explosion. This event, which Tinguely called Homage to New York, is one of the most iconic artworks of the twentieth century.

THomas Bock born 1790 in sutton Coldfield, uk died 1855 in hobart, australia

aDolF luTHer born 1912 in krefeld, gerMany died 1990 in krefeld

DesTiny Deacon anD Virginia Fraser destiny deaCon

kasimir maleVicH

born 1957 in Maryborough, australia

born 1878 in kiev, ukraine died 1935 in st Petersburg, russia

virginia fraser born in Melbourne live and work in Melbourne (see Page 57 for More.) mark Dion born 1961 in new bedford, usa lives and works in new york City, usa ross giBson born 1956 in brisbane, australia lives and works in sydney, australia aBBie HoFFman born 1936 in worChester, MassaChusetts, usa died 1989 in new hoPe, Pennsylvania, usa yVes klein born 1928 in niCe, franCe died 1962 in Paris, franCe

Jannis kounellis

born 1936 in Piraeus, greeCe lives and works in roMe, italy Balang kuBarrku born c. 1922 in kukabarnka, yikarrakkal and kubuMi hoMelands, Maningrida, Central arnheM land, northern territory, australia died 2008. kulMarru Clan. duwa Moiety, balang subseCtion. eastern kunwinJku language Bari kumar born 1966 in vakadu, india lives and works in los angeles, usa ricHarD larTer

gorDon maTTa-clark born 1943 in new york City, usa died 1978 in nyaCk, usa saBuro murakami born 1925 in kobe, JaPan died 1996 in nishinoMiya, JaPan yoko ono born 1933 in tokyo, JaPan lives and works in new york City, usa giulio Paolini born 1940 in genoa, italy lives and works in turin, italy PusHwagner born 1940 in oslo, norway lives and works in oslo roBerT smiTHson born 1938 in PassaiC, usa died 1973 in aMarillo, usa

Jesús raFael soTo born 1923 in Ciudad bolívar, veneZuela died 2005 in Paris, franCe slaVko TiHec born 1928 in Maribor, slovenia died 1993 in Maribor Tommy TranTino born 1938 in brooklyn, new york, usa lives and works in CaMden, new Jersey, usa VikTor Vasarely born 1906 or 1908 in PéCs, hungary died 1997 in Paris, franCe

born 1929 in london, uk lives and works in yass, australia

2008 biennale of sydney guide

w south wales events art gallery of events at art gallery of new south wales tours

artist PerforManCe

guiDeD Tours daily 12 noon–1 PM wednesday 7.15 PM

ryan ganDer LOOSE ASSOCIATIONS LECTURE (VERSION 1.1), 2008 wednesday 9 July, 3.45–4.45 PM Centenary auditoriuM

free

ON HONESTY, 2008 wednesday 9 July, 7.20–8.20 PM Centenary auditoriuM

artist talks and Conversations ayreen anasTas anD rene gaBri

sunday 22 June, 3 PM

ranBir kaleka

thursday 19 June, 12 noon

Tim lee

thursday 19 June, 11.30 aM

renaTa lucas

thursday 19 June, 1 PM

wystan Curnow on len lye

thursday 19 June, 11 aM

raQuel ormella

tuesday 24 June, 1 PM

Dan PerJoVscHi

wednesday 18 June, 5.30 PM

lia PerJoVscHi

friday 20 June, 1 PM

micHael rakowiTz

wednesday 18 June, 6 PM

sTuarT ringHolT

sunday 22 June, 3.30 PM

aChille bonito oliva on luigi russolo

wednesday 18 June, 5 PM

micHael snow

thursday 19 June, 3 PM

free

London-based artist Ryan Gander will present an edition of his Loose Associations Lecture (Version 1.1) along with a second lecture titled On Honesty. These lectures, which the artist has been staging and adapting since 2001, involve the presentation of video, images and sound as a meditation on the links between disparate cultural phenomena. free

Bookings essential: ‘what’s on’ www.bos2008.com ross giBson CONVERSATIONS II, 2008 entranCe Court wednesday 18 June – sunday 7 sePteMber daily 10 aM–1 PM & 2–4 PM

For the duration of the Biennale, members of the public are invited to converse with Australian artist Ross Gibson. Five conversations are available each day and Gibson will keep a weblog of the clustered topics that emerge during the three months. Using the most basic elements – time, language, attentiveness – the project seeks some humble revolutions: the turn of thinking that can excite a generous exchange. free

liam gillick RELATIONS OF EqUIVALENCE: THREE POTENTIAL ENDINGS, 2008 wednesday 3 – friday 5 sePteMber, daily 2–4 PM

Liam Gillick is a New York and London-based artist, who works in sculpture, installation and text. He has also published several books and teaches at Columbia University, New York. His work often involves interaction with the public to consider how social, historical and economic realities are shaped and manipulated.

Further information and bookings: ‘what’s on’ www.bos2008.com sTuarT ringHolT ANGER WORkSHOPS, 2008 daily froM Monday, 16 – tuesday, 24 June wednesday 9 – thursday, 15 July Monday 1 – sunday, 7 sePteMber workshoP tiMes: 12 noon and 3PM workshoP duration: 20 Minutes

Relations of Equivalence: Three Potential Endings is a series of talks, over three days, which incorporate drinks at the Bells Hotel, Woolloomooloo, as part of each lecture session. Gillick has previously staged similar lectures at unitednationsplaza in Berlin and at the New Museum, New York.

Australian artist Stuart Ringholt is offering groups of people the opportunity to lose inhibition in an environment of sound and music. Through the device of an active mediation, groups will return to a primal state where human limits and potentials can be experienced and examined. If it seems easier to get angry than be loving in life this workshop will reverse the trend.

free

Bookings essential: ‘what’s on’ www.bos2008.com

2008 biennale of sydney guide

new south wales events art gallery refer to Pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues bookings and inforMation: (02) 9225 1878 or www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/events. for sChool PrograMs: (02) 9225 1740

keynote leCtures and ConferenCes PuBlic lecTure: carolyn cHrisToV-BakargieV Centenary auditoriuM, level 1 thursday 26 June, 1–2 PM

Artistic Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev will present a talk on the theme of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions - Forms That Turn and its relevance within the contemporary world, focusing on the relationship between revolutionary moments in the history of modern art and the practices of artists today. free

Biennales in Dialogue Forum keynoTe lecTure: okwui enwezor doMain theatre, lower level 3 wednesday 9 July, 5–7 PM

Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President, San Francisco Art Institute, Okwui Enwezor is Artistic Director of the 7th Gwangju Biennale. Enwezor will address issues relating to the rapidly developing environment of Biennales and Triennials and will include perspectives from other important events around the world, all facing numerous challenges of economic, global, political and socio-cultural change.

session 1: THe reTurn anD THe Filmic imaginaire PartiCiPants: gerard byrne, williaM kentridge, kathryn Millard and MiChael snow. friday 20 June, 10 aM–1 PM session 2: scienTiFic reVoluTions PartiCiPants: garland allen, attila CsÖrgŐ, sharMila saMant and John Potts. friday 20 June, 2–4.30 PM session 3: Dynamism, kineTicism, sounD anD colour PartiCiPants: tyler Cann, wystan Curnow, virginia Madsen and hans ulriCh obrist saturday 21 June, 10 aM–11.40 aM session 4: worD: sPoken, sung, seen PartiCiPants: riChard bell, eMory douglas, saM durant, roMaine Moreton, stePhen MueCke and MC trey. saturday 21 June, 1.45–4.30 PM

The 2008 Biennale of Sydney Symposium is held in partnership with the Department of Media, Macquarie University and the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).

art after hours lobby talks alan saunDers wednesday 18 June, 6.30–7 PM

Okwui Enwezor’s visit has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

ABC Radio National presenter Alan Saunders talks with 2008 Biennale of Sydney Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and artist Ross Gibson.

free

Bookings essential: ‘what’s on’ www.bos2008.com

2008 biennale of sydney syMPosiuM doMain theatre, lower level 3 friday 20 June & saturday 21 June free

THe 2008 Biennale oF syDney symPosium keynoTe lecTure ProFessor micHael Taussig: Humming saturday 21 June, 12–1 PM

Taking his lead from Winnie-the-Pooh and F. Nietzsche, Michael Taussig (professor of anthropology at Columbia University) explores the place between singing and talking where the hum of the great bumble bee meets the body of our faltering world.

2008 biennale of sydney guide

george alexanDer anD Dougal PHilliPs wednesday 25 June, 5.30–6.15 PM

George Alexander, Coordinator Contemporary Programs, Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Dr Dougal Phillips, Public Program and Education Manager, Biennale of Sydney, discuss the 2008 Biennale works on display. free BarBara Flynn, PeneloPe seiDler anD Dick Quan wednesday 25 June, 6.30–7.15 PM

Contemporary art patrons and collectors Barbara Flynn, Penelope Seidler and Dick Quan discuss international biennale events. free

w south wales events art gallery of refer to Pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues

2008 biennale of sydney filM series

Co-curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Robert Herbert doMain theatre, lower level 3 every wednesday & sunday during the biennale free

Screening features, documentary and experimental film selected from 100 years of cinema, this series examines revolution in its many diverse forms. It explores the energy of revolution and the avant-garde impulse. wednesday 18 June, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 22 June, 2 PM gHosTs BeFore BreakFasT, 1927 (gerMany) direCtor: hans riChter 7 Mins, 16MM blaCk-and-white rated r (unClassified)

In 1916, the German artist Hans Richter joined the Dada movement and asserted that the artist’s duty was to be explicitly political, opposing war and supporting the artistic avant-garde. In 1919, he began intensive experimentation with film. Ghosts before Breakfast is pure Dada – humorous, delightful, grotesque. Challenging bourgeois values, Richter presents a series of irrational happenings, when ordinary objects defy their daily use: a bow-tie undoes itself, bowler hats spring from their owner’s heads and coffee cups leap to their destruction. eVeryTHing Turns, eVeryTHing reVolVes, 1929 (gerMany) direCtor: hans riChter 4 Mins, 16MM blaCk-and-white rated r (unClassified)

Transforming a day at a Berlin carnival into a surreal, grotesque spectacle, Richter’s first sound film attracted the attention of Nazi officials who hated its modernism. The potent, high-speed, gun loading sequence anticipates the sex-and-violence obsession of the late twentieth century.

Dreams THaT money can Buy, 1947 (us) direCtor: hans riChter (in Collaboration with Max ernst, fernand léger, Man ray, MarCel duChaMP and alexander Calder) 84 Mins, 16MM Colour rated r (unClassified)

In 1947 Richter, living in the US after escaping the Second World War, collaborated with various artists in a collective study of dreams. Bound together in a scenario concerning a man who sells dreams to jaded customers, Dreams that Money Can Buy is divided into seven episodes created by Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder and Richter. wednesday 25 June, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 29 June, 2 PM anémic cinema, 1926 (franCe) direCtor: MarCel duChaMP (in Collaboration with Man ray) 7 Mins, 16MM blaCk-and-white rated r (unClassified)

Emerging as one of the most extreme avant-gardists, Duchamp epitomised irreverence for conventional aesthetics. This led to his infamous ‘readymades’, which laid the foundation for an aesthetic revolution. His sculpture Bicycle Wheel (1913) demonstrated a recurring preoccupation with movement. From his earlier painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) through to his film Anémic Cinema, Duchamp was fascinated by the hypnotic power of cyclical movement. This unique film is based on a series of rotating, spiralling images intercut with spinning words that make nonsensical puns – an abstract experiment in concentricity and eccentricity. VerTigo, 1958 (us) direCtor: alfred hitChCoCk 128 Mins, 35MM Colour rated Pg JaMes stewart, kiM novak

Vertigo: a sensation that one’s surroundings are rotating or that one is rotating oneself. The state produces dizziness, mental bewilderment and confusion. Considered Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo is the story of a troubled, neurotic detective, Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), who is haunted by his fear of heights. He is hired by an old friend to shadow his wandering wife. As he gradually falls in love with the mysterious woman, Scottie becomes alarmingly obsessive and unstable. A masterful study of romantic longing, identity, manipulation, voyeurism, treachery and death.

2008 biennale of sydney guide

new south wales events art gallery refer to Pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues

wednesday 2 July, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 6 July, 2 PM sTrike, 1924 (ussr) direCtor: sergei eisenstein 73 Mins, 35MM blaCk-and-white russian with english intertitles rated Pg MaxiM straukh, grigori alexandroff

Completed in 1925, Eisenstein’s first film is one of his finest. It tells the story of a factory strike, led by young workers who are members of the Bolshevik Party, protesting against the intolerable conditions of pre-revolutionary employment. Making radical use of montage, Eisenstein juxtaposes harshly beautiful imagery to create metaphorical meanings: men, animals and machinery are synchronised to suggest the inhumanity of capitalism. Epic in scale, Strike continues to stir emotion as a rousing tale of human dignity and the awesome power of collective action.

70, 1970 (us) direCtor: robert breer 5 Mins, 16MM Colour, silent rated r (unClassified) aniMated, Coloured shaPes PBl #2, 1968 (us) direCtor: robert breer 1 Min, 16MM Colour rated r (unClassified) a ConCise, Cartoon history of the blaCk aMeriCan. lmno, 1978 (us) direCtor: robert breer 10 Mins, 16MM Colour rated r (unClassified)

‘[A] French gendarme weaves a hapless path through the film’s strobe attacks, disparate drawing styles, and variable scale … Framed by underwater and travel imagery, the central section’s faucets and aerosols, collapsing tents and outsized croquet games, breakfast foods and sexual violence, all suggest domestic frustration.’ J Hoberman, The Village Voice

wednesday 9 July, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 13 July, 2 PM Ten canoes, 2006 (australia) direCtors: rolf de heer & Peter dJigirr 90 Mins, 35MM Colour rated M JaMie gulPilil, franCes dJulibing narrated by david gulPilil ganalbingu with english subtitles

A tale within a tale within a tale, Ten Canoes explores narrative and traditional storytelling. As the stories weave back and forth in time, they challenge conventional perceptions of the lives of Aboriginal peoples. An allAboriginal cast gives rare depth and authenticity to this cautionary tale of a younger brother who yearns for an older brother’s wife.

3 films by Len Lye The New Zealand-born filmmaker, painter, kinetic sculptor and writer Len Lye became a leading avant-garde artist in London and New York. Associated with many groundbreaking art groups, Lye is best remembered for his contributions to the development of hand-crafted abstract cinema. Free raDicals, 1958 revise 1979 (usa) direCtor: len lye 4 Mins, 16MM Colour rated r (unClassified)

A kinetic dance of white lines and angles meticulously scratched into the emulsion of a strip of black film and synchronised to field recordings of drumming performed by the Bagirmi tribe of Africa.

saturday 19 July, 2 PM: exPeriMental CineMa

3 Films by Robert Breer Robert Breer has been a major figure in experimental animation for more than 40 years. His large body of work includes paintings, kinetic sculpture and films. Breer studied painting in the US and moved to Europe in the 1940s, where he was influenced by the work of Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. Returning to the US in the early 1960s, he embarked on a career in animation.

2008 biennale of sydney guide

TraDe TaTToo, 1937 (uk) direCtor: len lye 5 Mins, 16MM Colour rated r (unClassified)

Experimenting with the colour separation systems of the newly developed Technicolour process, Trade Tattoo manipulates three colour matrices, superimposing them in complex ways. It also combines ‘direct’ working on film with black-and-white documentary footage.

w south wales events art gallery of refer to Pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues a colour Box, 1935 (uk) direCtor: len lye 4 Mins, 35MM Colour rated r (unClassified)

Made for the GPO Film Unit to advertise the postal system, A Colour Box was the first time Lye had painted directly on to the film surface and represents one of the earliest attempts to perfect the innovation now known as ‘direct’ filmmaking. Lye originally planned a selfsufficient abstract film, but made it afresh when tailoring it to advertising needs. In addition to painting on to raw film stock, Lye also scratched directly into the emulsion to create his unique effects. Five-minute intermission

laPis, 1963–66 (us) direCtor: JaMes whitney 9 Mins, 16MM Colour rated r (unClassified)

To the ancient alchemists Lapis was a kind of ‘philosopher’s stone’ or aid to meditation. The hypnotic effect of the elaborate, shifting patterns in James Whitney’s groundbreaking work was created by analogue computer; shapes consisting of hundreds of parts are organised through the use of geometry and repetitions of detail. Whitney is regarded as one of the major exponents of the experimental film genre known as ‘visual music’. Lapis took three years to create and is one of seven innovative short films he completed over four decades. Ho, 1979 (braZil) direCtor: ivan Cardoso 13 Mins, 35MM Colour rated r (unClassified)

Artist Hélio Oiticica’s parangolés are three-dimensional, multicoloured costumes worn in playful participation and social and aesthetic protest. These creations were used by the samba group from the shantytown of Mangueira, in Rio de Janeiro, in 1964. Oiticica’s intentions are demonstrated in Ivan Cardoso’s film with original footage showing the parangolés being worn and paraded. Some of the most important members of the Brazilian avantgarde appear, including singer Caetano Veloso, writers Waly Salomão and Ferreira Gullar, and the artist Lygia Clark.

wednesday 16 July, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 20 July, 2 PM ViDeograms oF a reVoluTion, 1992 (gerMany) direCtor: harun faroCki and andrei uJiCa 106 Mins, 16MM Colour gerMan with english subtitles rated r (unClassified)

Assembled under the direction of Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica from independent and state video and film sources, Videograms of a Revolution chronicles the Romanian revolution of 1989 – including the fall, attempted flight and Christmas-day execution of President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena. The documentary consists of found-footage, assembled and intercut to gradually reveal the course of history over the ten days of populist revolt. Using the film and video sources to full advantage, the filmmakers present some of the major moments in the story from multiple perspectives – a strategy that subtly interrogates the use of film in recording history.

wednesday 23 July, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 27 July, 2 PM THe man wiTH a moVie camera, 1929 (ussr) direCtor: dZiga vertov 69 Mins, 35MM blaCk-and-white rated g

‘We proclaim the old films, based on romance, theatrical films and the like, to be … mortally dangerous! Contagious!’ Abandoning the name of Denis Kaufman and adopting the pseudonym Dziga Vertov (derived from the verb meaning to spin), the radical Russian filmmaker created a revolution in cinematic art with his defiant deconstruction of moviemaking. The Man with a Movie Camera pulses with unruly energy and innovation, subverting the conventions of fictional filmmaking by employing filmic devices in order to comment on daily life, modernity and vision itself: superimposition, split screens, varied speed and obtrusive editing. The scenario concerns the making of a movie about the city of Moscow. We follow the production from shooting to public screening. The subject matter is the shops, traffic, children, coal miners, tram cars, shuttle looms, traffic signals, motor cars and workers of Moscow during the heyday of the Soviet Union.

2008 biennale of sydney guide

new south wales events art gallery refer to Pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues

wednesday 30 July, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 3 august, 2 PM green BusH, 2005 (australia) direCtor: warwiCk thornton 27 Mins, 35MM Colour rated r (unClassified) david Page, ted egan

Over one heartbreaking but empowering night, radio DJ Kenny realises that his job at an Aboriginal community radio station is about more than just playing music. BackroaDs, 1977 (australia) direCtor: PhilliP noyCe (in Collaboration with gary foley) 60 Mins, 16MM Colour rated M15+ bill hunter, gary foley

Two men, an aimless white drifter and an Aborigine on the run from an unsuccessful marriage, steal a car and take off on a wild flight across Australia. Noyce’s first feature, scripted in close collaboration with Gary Foley (a well-known Aboriginal activist), is an existentialist road movie of raw urgency and powerful political content that has at its core an angry inter-racial relationship.

wednesday 6 august, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 10 august, 2 PM enTr’acTe, 1924 (franCe) direCtor: rené Clair 20 Mins, 35MM blaCk-and-white rated r (unClassified)

Two men approach a cannon and fire it; rifle-range dummies sway in the wind; a dancing ballerina turns into a strange bearded man; two men on a roof-top terrace play a game of chess; a funeral procession, moving in slow motion, follows a coffin pulled by a camel. At once captivating, disturbing and humorous, Entr’acte is an apparently free-form flow of suggestive imagery reflecting René Clair’s interest in Dada and Surrealism. This concoction was originally made to be screened during intervals for Francis Picabia’s ‘interventionist’ ballet Relâche, presented at the Théâtre des ChampsElysées in Paris in 1924.

l’Âge D’or, 1930 (franCe) direCtor: luis buñuel 64 Mins, 35MM blaCk-and-white rated Pg

Provoking riots during its original screening and banned for almost four decades, this Surrealist film juxtaposes shocking scenes and heretical images that attack the social order. The scenario of a man and a woman who are continually thwarted in their attempts to make love is punctuated by bizarre, often hilarious set pieces. Buñuel thirsted for a revolution that would be triggered by scandal. ‘The real purpose of Surrealism,’ he said, was ‘to explode the social order, to transform life itself.’

wednesday 13 august, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 17 august, 2 PM rocking THe FounDaTions, 1985 (australia) direCtor: Pat fiske 92 Mins, 16MM blaCk-and-white rated M

Pat Fiske’s compelling and inspirational documentary chronicles the history of the NSW Builders Labourers Federation in its attempt to save historic Sydney buildings and communities. The film focuses on the battles for Victoria Street, Kings Cross and The Rocks, and the use of union power in assisting resident action groups and environmental groups in their struggles with powerful and corrupt developers.

wednesday 20 august, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 24 august, 2 PM zero For conDucT, 1933 (franCe) direCtor: Jean vigo 44 Mins, 35MM blaCk-and-white frenCh with english subtitles rated r (unClassified) louis lefèvre, gilbert PluChon

Made in 1933, but banned by the French censor for a dozen years, Vigo’s study of schoolboy life embodies the atmosphere of the period and the director’s world view. The blend of contradicting styles reflects Vigo’s schoolboy sense of delight in conjuring tricks. Inherited from his anarchist father (who died, presumably murdered, in prison), Vigo was a committed contrarian. Here the schoolboy heroes rebel against authority with ferocious verbal insults, pelting the local dignitaries with rubbish. Thirty-five years later the film inspired Lindsay Anderson in his own attack on the Establishment, If… (screening 3 & 7 September). Five-minute intermission

2008 biennale of sydney guide

w south wales events art gallery of refer to Pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues la JeTée, 1962 (franCe) direCtor: Chris Marker 28 Mins, 35MM blaCk-and-white english-language version rated M15+ hélène Chatelain, davos haniCh

Constructed almost exclusively from still photographs, La jetée is the strange and unsettling tale of a man projected through time by scientists seeking a way of ensuring human survival after a third world war. The man has one memory embedded into his emotions: the image of a woman standing on the pier at Orly airport. When the man remembers, we are never sure if he is timetravelling or dreaming. Director Marker constructed the film using a fragmented, circular timeline that flows from one dimension to another.

wednesday 27 august, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 31 august, 2 PM THe BaTTle oF algiers, 1965 (algeria/italy) direCtor: gillo PonteCorvo 117 Mins, 35MM blaCk-and-white frenCh and arabiC with english subtitles rated M15+ Jean Martin, yaCef saadi

This astounding recreation of the insurrection against the French in Algiers in the late 1950s is told from the differing perspectives of the French Army and the Algerian Liberation Front. Featuring such graphic realism that, upon its release in 1965, many wrongly assumed it incorporated documentary footage, the film is one of the most detailed, vivid and specific cinematic depictions of revolt against colonial rule.

saturday 6 sePteMber, 1.30 PM la région cenTrale, 1971 (Canada) direCtor: MiChael snow 180 Mins, 16MM Colour rated r (unClassified)

Exploding the possibilities of the ‘structural film’, Michael Snow’s groundbreaking La Région centrale was made during five days of shooting on a deserted mountaintop in North Quebec. During the shooting, the vertical and horizontal movements of the camera were controlled by a purpose-built, robotic arm capable of sophisticated, pre-programmed movements. The result is a film that radically explores frame movement and its relationship with space and time: documenting the spectacular, isolated landscape, capturing the cosmic cycles of light and darkness, with a camera seemingly independent of a discernible centre of gravity. 80

wednesday 3 sePteMber, 2 PM & 7.15 PM sunday 7 sePteMber, 2 PM iF…, 1968 (uk) direCtor: lindsay anderson 111 Mins, 35MM blaCk-and-white & Colour rated r (unClassified) MalColM MCdowell, david wood

A timely film whose shooting began two months before the events of May 1968, If… is an allegorical story about a revolution, led by pupil Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), that takes place in an English boarding school. Anderson brilliantly employs documentary realism with surrealistic passages and a fractured chronology to explore this quintessentially British institution as a microcosm of society.

aCCess PrograMs lorD mayor’s communiTy access Day saturday 23 august, 10 aM–4.30 PM art gallery events at 11 aM, 1.30 PM & 3.30 PM

Lord Mayor’s Community Access Day is a day-long event that opens up the exhibition’s key themes and artworks for people with disabilities and their carers. A free bus is available between the three venues. See page 94 for full event schedule. At the Art Gallery a tactile, simple English tour for people with an intellectual disability will take place from 11 am; AUSLAN-interpreted tour from 1.30 pm; audio-described tour from 3.30 pm. Presented by the Biennale of Sydney, the City of Sydney, Accessible Arts, Pier 2/3, Museum of Contemporary Art and Public Programs 2008 Art Gallery of New South Wales. AUSLAN interpreters from Deaf Society of NSW. Audio describers from Vision Australia. free

Information and bookings through Accessible Arts: (02) 9251 6499 (ext 6) or amclaren@aarts.net.au

kids and faMilies inTeracTiVe arT Monday–friday 7–11 July, 1.30 PM

Explore contemporary art with Open Stage Productions, using imaginative, improvisational storytelling. free

2008 biennale of sydney guide

new south wales events art gallery refer to Pages 90–94 for the full 2008 biennale events Calendar aCross all venues

sChools and eduCation Biennale oF syDney TeacHer PreView tuesday 24 June, 5.15–7.30 PM

Pry open Revolutions – Forms That Turn with a curatorial overview by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney; the artist’s experience with exhibiting artist Raquel Ormella; and an outline of education strategies, programs and resources. $15, includes refreshments, exhibition viewing, audience interactive exploration and resources Full program and booking form: www.artgallery.nsw.gov. au/ed/712/prof_dev/previews TeacHers’ Tour: exclusiVe insigHTs inTo cockaToo islanD anD Pier 2/3 For HigH scHool TeacHers Meet at Pier 2/3 inforMation desk saturday 28 June, 10 aM

reVoluTionary arT – arT For reVoluTion (years 9–12) 25 & 27 June, 22, 24 & 30 July, 5 & 8 august, 10.30–11.30 aM

Unpack Revolutions – Forms That Turn, its key themes and artworks. Consider the curatorial selection of historical and contemporary artists and the dialogue created between artist and audience. Examine the deliberate choice of the Gallery as a venue for these artists, and the challenges they present. Students $3 Bookings essential: www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/ed/book Discussion Tour (years 7–12) 1 hour

Revolt in the Biennale: revolving, rotating, mirroring, repeating, reversing, turning upside down or inside out are some of the Biennale’s themes, but also fun and useful strategies to decode and interpret contemporary art. Confront key artworks, develop these skills and consider the impulse of artists to ‘revolt’ against systems and structures. $127.50 per group of 15 students or less Bookings essential: www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/ed/book

a PartnershiP PrograM between the biennale of sydney, art gallery of new south wales and MuseuM of ConteMPorary art. free, inCludes ferry triP froM Pier 2/3 to CoCkatoo island

Bookings essential: ‘what’s on’ www.bos2008.com sChool itineraries available froM www.bos2008.CoM/Page/ sChools.htMl

seconDary sTuDy morning (years 10–12) artistiC direCtor and artist interview tuesday 1 July, 10.30 aM–12 noon

Join the Artistic Director of the 2008 Biennale, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and artist Ross Gibson to discuss the curatorial concept and Gibson’s practice. Followed by an audience Q&A. Students $3 Bookings essential: www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/ed/book

2008 biennale of sydney guide

rTspaCe arTspaCe arTspaCe arTspaCe

Artspace is a leading international residency-based contemporary art centre, housed in the historic Gunnery Building in Woolloomooloo fronting Sydney Harbour. Prioritising the ideas and practices of artists, Artspace fosters the development of challenging new installation-based work, including projects in video, performance, sound, interactive and other forms of developing technologies. Through public program, education and publication activities, Artspace explores critical contexts for contemporary art and encourages examination of the diverse social, political and visual processes that shape Australian culture within both regional and global frameworks.

Artspace explores critical contexts for contemporary art

Jeremy deller Claire fonTaine valie eXporT

marCellus l.

piero manZoni

aipotu

sam duranT

2008 biennale of sydney guide

arTspaCe arTspaCe arTspaCe arTspaC

ARTSPACE 43–51 Cowper wharf road woolloomooloo open Tuesday To sunday 11 am–5 pm Thursday unTil 8 pm ph: (02) 9356 0555 www.arTspaCe.org.au

aipotu

Jeremy deller

aiPotu is a mobile art project created by two Norwegian artists, Andreas Siqueland (born 1973 in Oslo) and Anders Kjellesvik (born 1980 in Stord). The name comes from an inversion of the word ‘utopia’, indicating a way of looking backwards and forwards at the same time. Site-specific and collaborative, aiPotu’s works are a series of sculptural interventions in public spaces. Their ongoing project, The Island Tour, is made up of island expeditions that commenced in August 2007. For the Sydney Biennale, the artists are creating an installation of posters from their latest island expeditions to Iceland. Visitors will encounter images as if on an inverted island, circulating in the room and shifting between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ perspectives. The artists are also working on building a maritime camp on Cockatoo Island, including a sculpture that will be part of aiPotu’s next island project.

born 1966 in london, uK lives and worKs in london

(See page 23 for more.)

Jeremy Deller investigates the relationships between the public and private spheres, and between ‘high’ and popular culture, through recordings, lectures, performances, exhibitions, publications and archive projects. I’m with this Idiot (2008) is a compilation of fragments of video footage shot over a long period of time, mostly in London. This footage is effectively ‘found’, as many of the items were filmed by chance. In this dynamic montage, Deller brings together imagery of groups participating in collective activity within public spaces. We see ants working together to cart away a potato chip, and we witness a small-scale re-enactment of the French Revolution. From marches and street concerts to a naked man with a protest sign, I’m with this Idiot explores chance and strange collective practices, as well as self-organised events in the contemporary city. (See page 15 for more.)

aipotu If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes, 2008 Courtesy the artists

2008 biennale of sydney guide

Jeremy deller I’m with this Idiot, 2008 Courtesy the artist

Ce arTisTs arTspaCe arTisTs arTspaCe sam duranT

valie eXporT

Claire fonTaine

born 1961 in seaTTle, usa lives and worKs in los angeles, usa

born 1940 in linZ, ausTria lives and worKs in vienna, ausTria

paris-based ColleCTive founded in 2004

Sam Durant has used installation, drawing, sculpture and text since the early 1990s to explore language and society, and how individuals and groups articulate their concerns publicly. His work takes a critical view of social, political and cultural issues, exploring the varying relationships between popular culture and fine art. He has engaged in subjects as diverse as the civil rights movement, southern rock music and modernist architecture. For the Biennale, the artist has created a series of illuminated signs containing decontextualised quotes from signs used during protest demonstrations. Statements are drawn both from the Aboriginal civil rights movement in Australia and from African American and Native American civil rights movements in the United States. It is art about the use and meaning of political language in society. Durant’s You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect (2008) is exhibited at Artspace on the outside of the building.

A pioneer of performance and video art in the 1960s, VALIE EXPORT has been a defining presence in the rise of feminist art practices. Her work questions and explores the social and sexual conventions that govern the representation of the female body and, through this, the objectification of women. EXPORT used guerrilla tactics in her direct confrontation with the everyday, interacting with members of the public on the street and in a variety of public spaces. In Tapp und Tastkino (Touch Cinema) (1968), EXPORT walked the streets of Vienna and Munich with a cardboard stage attached to her torso, while a collaborator invited members of the public to insert their hands through a curtain and touch EXPORT’s naked breasts inside.

After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a ‘readymade artist’ and began to elaborate a version of neoconceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box – as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes – there is always the possibility of what she calls the ‘human strike’. Claire Fontaine makes herself an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. For the Biennale of Sydney, she exhibits a video that demonstrates how to pick a lock.

Claire fontaine Instructions for the sharing of private property, 2006 Courtesy the artist; air de paris, paris; and galerie Chantal Crousel, paris

(See page 38 for more.)

sam durant design for You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect, 2008 Courtesy the artist and blum & poe, los angeles; with support of the farrell family foundation

2008 biennale of sydney guide

arTisTs arTspaCe arTisTs arTspaCe ar marCellvs l.

piero manZoni

darius miKšys

born 1980 in belo horiZonTe, braZil lives and worKs in berlin, germany and são paulo, braZil

born 1933 in sonCino, Cremona, iTaly died 1963 in milan, iTaly

born 1969 in Kaunas, liThuania lives and worKs in vilnius, liThuania

Piero Manzoni’s artistic practice developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s and explored the limits between art and life, the personal and the universal. He investigated what it means to create an artwork and ultimately revolutionised our idea of what art is or could be, contributing to the development of what would later come to be called conceptual art. Inspired by the notion of the readymade object (an object found by the artist and turned thereby into an artwork), Manzoni created the ultimate readymade in 1961 when he installed a public artwork in a park in Herning, Denmark. Still there today, the sculpture consists of a large plinth in iron that lies on the ground, with some upside-down words in French. The words translate as, ‘Base of the World, Magic Base No. 3 by Piero Manzoni 1961 Homage to Galileo’.

Darius Mikšys’s work focuses on context-specific projects, working with the site, environment and conditions of where the project takes place. Interested in models of understanding and communication through social interaction, Mikšys will stage an event during the opening week of the Biennale. For the Parents Meeting in Sydney, parents of participating artists are invited to Artspace to meet the Artistic Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who will inform them about what kind of ‘projects’ their children create. Through their participation in this event, the parents realise that they too have become artists in the Biennale, alongside their own creations – their children. This event suggests generational return and a movement backwards from the artists to their parents as a form of creative movement forwards.

Marcellvs L.’s videos focus the lens on small, often unobserved, events, and his works seem to slow down time. A rope suspended in water that slowly moves with the swell, leaves blown by the wind, or a man walking down a street, are all captured with a prolonged gaze that foregrounds details usually gone unseen. Marcellvs L.’s work is an extension of temporality itself, shifting our attention away from narrative to the experience of a palpable staging of time. In spree (2007), a building seems still – yet, after a moment of viewing, it appears to be slightly moving. The title of the artwork reveals that the gentle bobbing movement of the recorded image is caused by the fact that it was filmed from a houseboat on the River Spree, never pictured. It is a vertiginous dialogue between two architectural forms – the houseboat and the house on the river.

marcellvs l. spree, 2007 Courtesy the artist and carlier l gebauer, berlin

2008 biennale of sydney guide

(See page 68 for more.)

darius mikšys How to simulate eye contact, 2007 Courtesy the artist and gasworks, london

nTs arTspaCe evenTs arTspaCe evenTs evenTs aT arTspaCe

booKings and informaTion: (02) 9356 0555 or www.arTspaCe.org.au

arTisT TalKs and ConversaTions

KeynoTe leCTures and ConferenCes

SAM DURANT

friday 20 June, 3.30 pm

MARCELLVS L.

friday 20 June, 4 pm

BIENNALE OF SYDNEY CONSTELLATION 2: SUBvERSIvE fORMS Thursday 19 June, 1.30–3.30 pm gunnery level 2 (above arTspaCe)

aiPotu

friday 20 June, 4.30 pm

free

In this Biennale of Sydney ‘constellation’, curators from Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the United States join with 2008 Biennale artists in a public conversation exploring the ways in which art can be a form of subversion today.

evenTs

free

PARENTS MEETINg IN SYDNEY, 2008 DARIUS MIKšYS wednesday, 18 June, 3–4.30 pm gunnery level 2 (above arTspaCe) free

arTisT presenTaTion

Darius Mikšys’s work focuses on context-specific projects, working with the environment and conditions of the site where the project takes place. Mikšys is interested in models of understanding and communication through social interaction. For Parents Meeting in Sydney, parents of participating artists are invited to Artspace to meet the 2008 Biennale of Sydney Artistic Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who will inform them about what kind of ‘projects’ their children create. Through their participation in this event, the parents realise that they too have become artists in the Biennale, alongside their own creations – their children. This event suggests generational return and a movement backwards from the artists to their parents as a form of creative movement forwards. free

Bookings essential: ‘whaT’s on’ www.bos2008.com

AYREEN ANASTAS AND RENE GABRI Tuesday 15 July, 6–7.30 pm gunnery level 2 (above arTspaCe)

In the summer of 2006, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri took a 45-day journey across the United States. Camp Campaign (campcampaign.info) attempted to address the internment camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by connecting it to various contemporary and historic sites of juridical exception within the US. For the Sydney Biennale, the artists have proposed a trip parallel to the one in the US in its form, but more speculative in its content. They will set themselves on the search for a possibility of revolution within the Australian continent – a trip in search of a new meaning for this word in this world. In this special event, upon their return from the Australian trip, Anastas and Gabri will provide a presentation about their project. free

Bookings essential: ‘whaT’s on’ www.bos2008.com

2008 biennale of sydney guide

oTher venues evenTs oTher venues e evenTs aT oTher venues

booKings and informaTion: (02) 9368 1411 or ‘whaT’s on’ www.bos2008.Com

in addiTion To evenTs aT 2008 biennale eXhibiTion venues evenTs will be held aT The following loCaTions:

CELL BLOCK THEATRE, NATIONAL ART SCHOOL performanCe JOAN JONAS READINg DANTE, 2008 sunday 22 June, 11 am–12 noon & 6–7 pm

A founding figure of video and performance art, Joan Jonas was originally a sculptor who began to participate in experimental dance workshops. She held her first performance in 1968. Since then, Jonas has explored the transformation of the performing body through perception, space and media, by using masks and mirrors, as well as different mythological and contemporary persona. Reading Dante is inspired by Dante’s early-fourteenthcentury Divine Comedy, incorporating elements from ‘Inferno’ and ‘Paradiso’. Jonas is premiering this new work in two performances for the Sydney Biennale. free

Bookings essential: ‘whaT’s on’ www.bos2008.com

CABRAMATTA/CANLEY VALE forum

Bus departs 9.20 am from Ivan Dougherty Gallery and 9.30 am from Biennale of Sydney offices, Woolloomooloo; arrives back at 5.45 pm. Forum commences 10.30 am, Bach Dang Restaurant, 46 Canley Vale Road, Canley Vale NSW 2166. In partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics and Casula Powerhouse. $25, inCludes lunCh and Tea aT The baCh dang resTauranT, plus $10 for bus Transfer.

Bookings essential: ‘whaT’s on’ www.bos2008.com

THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY ThinK TanK CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE UNITED STATES TODAY: A ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION for more informaTion and To regisTer for This evenT, visiT www.sydney.edu.au/us-sTudies or visiT: ‘whaT’s on’ www.bos2008.Com

The Biennale of Sydney, in partnership with the United States Studies Centre and the Power Institute: Foundation for Visual Art and Culture, University of Sydney, will hold a forum on the role and relevance of contemporary art in the political scene of the United States today, in both global and local terms. Artists from the 2008 Biennale of Sydney will join art historians and cultural commentators from Australia and the United States in this event. Members of the public are invited to take part in this discussion.

BIENNALE CONSTELLATION 3: ExTRA/ORDINARY CITIES: THE CULTURAL DYNAMICS Of URBAN INTERvENTION monday 23 June, 9.20 am–5.45 pm

Extra/Ordinary Cities is a dynamic forum examining the relationship between art, politics and the built environment in Asia and Australia. Travelling from Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs to the city’s southwest, this all-day event, centred at the Bach Dang Vietnamese Restaurant in Canley Vale/Cabramatta, brings together leading international artists, architects and writers for a series of presentations and discussion panels, culminating in a reception at the ‘Concrete Culture’ exhibition at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery/Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, UNSW. Featuring Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Michael Rakowitz, Manray Hsu (Taipei Biennale) and other Biennale of Sydney artists.

2008 biennale of sydney guide

f sydney online venue 2008 biennale

Each visit to the venue presents a new constellation of works that may include film, audio, images, interactive works, live streaming performances, texts and links to existing websites

2008 biennale of sydney guide

of sydney online venue 2008 biennal The 2008 Biennale also premieres a specially designed online venue www.bos2008.com/revolutionsonline

ONLINE VENUE www.bos2008.Com/ revoluTionsonline

This is an experimental space that encourages discovery through artists’ projects, videos, texts, YouTube, songs and even a Second Life space, live streaming performances and links to existing art online. Included in the venue are projects based on the exhibition theme Revolutions – Forms That Turn. The Online Venue is designed to reveal works in a non-linear way. Artist works are presented together by themes. Each visit to the venue presents a new constellation of works that may include film, audio, images, interactive works, live streaming performances, texts and links to existing websites. Works will be continuously uploaded to the venue, creating an ever-changing space.

Some examples:

ANDERS WEBERG & ROBERT WILLIM SuRReAL SCAnIA

Welcome to the imaginary world of Surreal Scania. These visual contemplations call forth dreamlike views of places all around the region of Scania in southern Sweden. How do different places become interesting? What are the common denominators between a heavy industrial harbour and a nature reserve? Surreal Scania examines these questions using digital technology, video equipment and GPS-units to investigate how aura and attraction are connected to different places.

LONG MARCH PROJECT LOng MARCHeRS Of THe WORLd – unITe!

MATIAS FALDBAKKEN unTiTled (young is beTTer Than old)

Untitled (Young is Better Than Old) is a continuation of Matias Faldbakken’s recent series of works made by writing on canvas, paper and walls in black isolation tape. One word or a sentence is layered on top of itself, obscuring the message and making it illegible. Suppressing language in favour of this mute visual gesture, the work explores the conflict between text and image.

2008 biennale of sydney guide

China’s Long March (1934–36) provides the metaphorical framework for this Beijing-based collective. The Long March Project is a complex, multi-platform, international arts organisation that collaborates with participants from around the world to reinterpret historical consciousness and develop new ways of perceiving political, social, economic and cultural realities. For the Sydney Biennale an interactive flash project engages the visitor to explore the concept of revolution today as an agency for social change.

evenTs Calendar 2008 biennale of sy June evenTs date/time

event information

venue

more info

12 noon–8 pm

arTisT performanCe: Tony sChwensen, fundRAZOR (fuCK YOu PAY Me) OR WHO geTS TO SIT AT THe POInTY end Of THe PLAne?

mCa

p47

1.30 pm

arTisT TalK: Jin Kurashige

CoCKaToo

p24

2.30 pm

arTisT TalK: paul pfeiffer

CoCKaToo

p24

TUESDAY 17 JUNE

WEDNESDAY 18 JUNE 10 am–5 pm

arTisT performanCe: Tony sChwensen, fundRAZOR (fuCK YOu PAY Me) OR WHO geTS TO SIT AT THe POInTY end Of THe PLAne?

mCa

p47

10.30–11.00 am

arTisT TalK: george bures miller

pier 2/3

p31

10.30 am–2 pm

biennale ConsTellaTion 1: neITHeR HeRe nOR THeRe

CoCKaToo

p24

2 pm

biennale film program: gHOSTS BefORe BReAKfAST; eVeRYTHIng TuRnS, eVeRYTHIng ReVOLVeS; dReAMS THAT MOneY CAn BuY

agnsw

p76

2–3 pm

leCTure/performanCe: william KenTridge

CoCKaToo

p24

2.30 pm

arTisT performanCe: dora garCÍa, WHAT A fuCKIng WOndeRfuL AudIenCe

mCa

p47

3–4.30 pm

arTisT proJeCT: darius miKšys, PARenTS MeeTIng In SYdneY

arTspaCe

p86

5 pm

speCial TalK: aChille boniTo oliva on luigi russolo

agnsw

p74

5.30 pm

arTisT TalK: dan perJovsChi

agnsw

p74

6 pm

arTisT TalK: miChael raKowiTZ

agnsw

p74

6.30–7 pm

arT afTer hours lobby TalK: alan saunders wiTh Carolyn ChrisTov-baKargiev and ross gibson

agnsw

p75

7.15 pm

biennale film program: gHOSTS BefORe BReAKfAST; eVeRYTHIng TuRnS, eVeRYTHIng ReVOLVeS; dReAMS THAT MOneY CAn BuY

agnsw

p76

THURSDAY 19 JUNE 9.30 am–2.30 pm

aTelier bow-wow and dan graham bus Trip

mCa

p48

11.00 am

arTisT TalK: wysTan Curnow on len lye

agnsw

p74

11.30 am

arTisT TalK: Tim lee

agnsw

p74

12 noon

arTisT TalK: ranbir KaleKa

agnsw

p74

12 noon–2.30 pm

aTelier bow-wow and dan graham ConferenCe

mCa

p48

1 pm

arTisT TalK: renaTa luCas

agnsw

p74

1.30–3.30 pm

biennale of sydney ConsTellaTion 2: SuBVeRSIVe fORMS

arTspaCe

p86

3 pm

arTisT TalK: miChael snow

agnsw

p74

6.30–7.30 pm

arTisT performanCe: dora garCÍa, JuST BeCAuSe eVeRYTHIng IS dIffeRenT IT dOeS nOT MeAn THAT AnYTHIng HAS CHAnged

soh

p53

FRIDAY 20 JUNE 10 am–1 pm

symposium session 1: THe ReTuRn And THe fILMIC IMAgInAIRe

agnsw

p75

1 pm

arTisT TalK: lia perJovsChi, SuBJeCTIVe ART HISTORY fROM MOdeRnISM TO TOdAY

agnsw

p74

2–4.30 pm

symposium session 2: SCIenTIfIC ReVOLuTIOnS

agnsw

p75

3–5 pm

arTisT performanCe: ana prvaCKi, MuSIC deRIVed PAIn KILLeR

mCa

p47

3.30 pm

arTisT TalK: sam duranT

arTspaCe

p86

4 pm

arTisT TalK: marCellvs l.

arTspaCe

p86

4.30 pm

arTisT TalK: aipotu

arTspaCe

p86

6.30–8 pm

lloyd rees memorial leCTure: dan graham, WORKS BeTWeen ART And ARCHITeCTuRe

mCa

p48

10–11.40 am

symposium session 3: dYnAMISM, KIneTICISM, SOund And COLOuR

agnsw

p75

12 noon

arTisT TalK: lene berg

CoCKaToo

p24

12–1 pm

The 2008 biennale of sydney KeynoTe leCTure: professor miChael Taussig, HuMMIng

agnsw

p75

12.30 pm

arTisT TalK: pedro baraTeiro

CoCKaToo

p24

12.40 pm

arTisT TalK: sharmila samanT

mCa

p47

1.20 pm

arTisT TalK: ana prvaCKi

mCa

p47

1.45–4.30 pm

symposium session 4: WORd: SPOKen, Sung, Seen

agnsw

p75

2 pm

arTisT TalK: aTTilla CsÖrgŐ

mCa

p47

SATURDAY 21 JUNE

2008 biennale of sydney guide

ydney evenTs Calendar 2008 biennal all evenTs are FREE unless oTherwise sTaTed on evenTs pages date/time date/time

event information event information

venue venue

2 pm

arTisT TalK: Tv moore

CoCKaToo

more info more info p24

2.30 pm

arTisT TalK: marK boulos

CoCKaToo

p24

2.40 pm

arTisT TalK: geoffrey farmer

mCa

p47

3.30 pm

arTisT TalK: lara favareTTo

CoCKaToo

p24

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

11–12 noon

arTisT performanCe: Joan Jonas, ReAdIng dAnTe

CbT

p87

12 noon

arTisT TalK: riChard bell

CoCKaToo

p24

12.30 pm

arTisT TalK: theweathergroup_u

CoCKaToo

p24

12.40 pm

arTisT TalK: anawana haloba

mCa

p47

1 pm

arTisT TalK: miKe parr

CoCKaToo

p24

1.30 pm

arTisT TalK: vernon ah Kee

CoCKaToo

p24

2 pm

arTisT TalK: Qiu anXiong

CoCKaToo

p24

2 pm

biennale film program: gHOSTS BefORe BReAKfAST; eVeRYTHIng TuRnS, eVeRYTHIng ReVOLVeS; dReAMS THAT MOneY CAn BuY

agnsw

p76

2 pm

arTisT TalK: Julie rrap

mCa

p47

2.30 pm

arTisT TalK: shaun gladwell

CoCKaToo

p24

3 pm

arTisT TalK: ayreen anasTas and rene gabri

agnsw

p74

3.20 pm

arTisT TalK: naTasCha sadr haghighian

mCa

p47

3.30 pm

arTisT TalK: sTuarT ringholT

agnsw

p74

6–7 pm

arTisT performanCe: Joan Jonas, ReAdIng dAnTe

CbT

p87

9.20 am–5.45 pm

biennale of sydney ConsTellaTion 3: eXTRA/ORdInARY CITIeS: THe CuLTuRAL dYnAMICS Of uRBAn InTeRVenTIOn

baCh dang

p87

5.30–8 pm

biennale of sydney TeaCher preview

mCa

p50

1 pm

arTisT TalK: raQuel ormella

agnsw

p74

5.15–7.30 pm

biennale of sydney TeaCher preview

agnsw

p81

10.30–11.30 am

revoluTionary arT – arT for revoluTion (years 9–12)

agnsw

p81

2 pm + 7.15 pm

biennale film program: AnÉMIC CIneMA; VeRTIgO

agnsw

p76

5.30–6.15 pm

floor TalK: george aleXander and dr dougal phillips

agnsw

p75

6.30–7.15 pm

arT afTer hours lobby TalK: barbara flynn, penelope seidler and diCK Quan

agnsw

p75

publiC leCTure: Carolyn ChrisTov-baKargiev

agnsw

p75

revoluTionary arT – arT for revoluTion (years 9–12)

agnsw

p81

SUNDAY 22 JUNE

MONDAY 23 JUNE

TUESDAY 24 JUNE

WEDNESDAY 25 JUNE

THURSDAY 26 JUNE 1–2 pm FRIDAY 27 JUNE 10.30–11.30 am SATURDAY 28 JUNE 10 am

sChools: eXClusive TeaChers’ Tour

pr 2/3/CoCKaToo p25+31

2.30 pm

arTisT performanCe: dora garCÍa, WHAT A fuCKIng WOndeRfuL AudIenCe

mCa

p47

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

2 pm

biennale film program: AnÉMIC CIneMA; VeRTIgO

agnsw

p76

5.30–7.30 pm

generaTioneXT: youTh evenT

mCa

p50

SUNDAY 29 JUNE

CoCKaToo Cockatoo island pp8–25 pier 2/3 pier 2/3, walsh bay pp26–31 agnsw art gallery of new south wales pp58–81 mCa museum of Contemporary art pp32–51

2008 biennale of sydney guide

arTspaCe artspace pp82–86 soh sydney opera house pp52–55 CbT Cell block Theatre p87 baCh dang bach dang vietnamese restaurant p87

daily guided tours are available at the mCa and the agnsw. performances by Stuart Ringholt and Ross Gibson will run at agnsw throughout the biennale. please see venue pages for event times and details.

evenTs Calendar 2008 biennale of sy July–augusT evenTs date/time

event information

venue

more info

10–11.30 am

arT baby

mCa

p49

10.30 am–12 noon

sChools: seCondary sTudy morning (years 10–12)

agnsw

p81

2 pm + 7.15 pm

biennale film program: STRIKe

agnsw

p77

2.30–3.30 pm

floor TalK: Carolyn ChrisTov-baKargiev

mCa

p47

11.30 am–12.30 pm

mysTery Tour 1

CoCKaToo

p24

1–2 pm

floor TalK: Carolyn ChrisTov-baKargiev

pier 2/3

p31

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

biennale film program: STRIKe

agnsw

p77

arT revoluTions: sChool holiday worKshop (ages 5–7)

mCa

p49

10.30 am–1 pm

arT revoluTions: sChool holiday worKshop (ages 8–11)

mCa

p49

12 noon

pierre huyghe, THe VALLeY OBSCuRed BY CLOudS opens (24-hr evenT)

soh

p54

2 pm

biennale film program: Ten CAnOeS

agnsw

p77

2.30 pm

arTisT performanCe: dora garCÍa, WHAT A fuCKIng WOndeRfuL AudIenCe

mCa

p47

3.45–4.45 pm

arTisT performanCe: ryan gander, LOOSe ASSOCIATIOnS LeCTuRe (VeRSIOn 1.1)

agnsw

p74

5–7 pm

BIennALeS In dIALOgue forum KeynoTe leCTure: oKwui enweZor

agnsw

p75

7.15 pm

biennale film program: Ten CAnOeS

agnsw

p77

7.20–8.20 pm

arTisT performanCe: ryan gander, On HOneSTY

agnsw

p74

TUESDAY 1 JULY

WEDNESDAY 2 JULY

SATURDAY 5 JULY

SUNDAY 6 JULY 2 pm TUESDAY 8 JULY 10.30 am–1 pm WEDNESDAY 9 JULY

THURSDAY 10 JULY 10.30 am–1 pm

arT revoluTions: sChool holiday worKshop (Teenagers)

mCa

p49

12 noon

pierre huyghe, THe VALLeY OBSCuRed BY CLOudS Closes (24-hr evenT)

soh

p54

5.30–7 pm

pierre huyghe in ConversaTion wiTh Carolyn ChrisTov-baKargiev

mCa

p47

BIennALeS In dIALOgue forum KeynoTe leCTure: roberT sTorr

mCa

p48

FRIDAY 11 JULY 6–7.30 pm SATURDAY 12 JULY 10.30 am–1 pm

revolTing Kids!

CoCKaToo

p25

11.30 am–12.30 pm

mysTery Tour 2

CoCKaToo

p24

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

biennale film program: Ten CAnOeS

agnsw

p77

10.30 am–12.30 pm

arT revoluTions: sChool holiday worKshop (family)

mCa

p49

6–7.30 pm

arTisT presenTaTion: ayreen anasTas and rene gabri

arTspaCe

p86

biennale film program: VIdeOgRAMS Of A ReVOLuTIOn

agnsw

p78

10.30 am–1 pm

more revolTing Kids!

CoCKaToo

p25

11.30 am–12.30 pm

mysTery Tour 3

CoCKaToo

2 pm

biennale film program: eXperimenTal Cinema

agnsw

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

2 pm

biennale film program: VIdeOgRAMS Of A ReVOLuTIOn

agnsw

p78

2–4 pm

hip hop and Krump danCe performanCe

mCa

p48

revoluTionary arT – arT for revoluTion (years 9–12)

agnsw

p81

SUNDAY 13 JULY 2 pm TUESDAY 15 JULY

WEDNESDAY 16 JULY 2 pm + 7.15 pm SATURDAY 19 JULY p24 p77+78

SUNDAY 20 JULY

TUESDAY 22 JULY 10.30–11.30 am

2008 biennale of sydney guide

ydney evenTs Calendar 2008 biennal all evenTs are FREE unless oTherwise sTaTed on evenTs pages date/time

event information

venue

more info

biennale film program: THe MAn WITH A MOVIe CAMeRA

agnsw

p78

revoluTionary arT – arT for revoluTion (years 9–12)

agnsw

p81

WEDNESDAY 23 JULY 2 pm + 7.15 pm THURSDAY 24 JULY 10.30–11.30 am SATURDAY 26 JULY 11.30 am–12.30 pm

mysTery Tour 4

CoCKaToo

p24

1–2 pm

floor TalK: dr dougal phillips and speCial guesT on Cardiff/miller

pier 2/3

p31

2.30 pm

arTisT performanCe: dora garCÍa, WHAT A fuCKIng WOndeRfuL AudIenCe

mCa

p47

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

12–2 pm

hip hop danCe worKshop

mCa

p48

2 pm

biennale film program: THe MAn WITH A MOVIe CAMeRA

agnsw

p78

2.30–4.30 pm

Krump danCe worKshop

mCa

p48

seCondary sTudy morning (years 11–12)

mCa

p50

10.30–11.30 am

revoluTionary arT – arT for revoluTion (years 9–12)

agnsw

p81

2 pm + 7.15 pm

biennale film program: gReen BuSH; BACKROAdS

agnsw

p79

SUNDAY 27 JULY

TUESDAY 29 JULY 10 am–1 pm WEDNESDAY 30 JULY

SATURDAY 2 AUGUST 11.30 am–12.30 pm

mysTery Tour 5

CoCKaToo

p24

1–2 pm

floor TalK: dr dougal phillips and speCial guesT on luigi russolo

pier 2/3

p31

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

12–4 pm

dJ worKshop

mCa

p48

2 pm

biennale film program: gReen BuSH; BACKROAdS

agnsw

p79

5.30–7.30 pm

generaTioneXT: youTh evenT

mCa

p50

revoluTionary arT – arT for revoluTion (years 9–12)

agnsw

p81

biennale film program: enTR’ACTe; L’Age d’OR

agnsw

p79

arT baby

mCa

p49

revoluTionary arT – arT for revoluTion (years 9–12)

agnsw

p81

11.30 am–12.30 pm

mysTery Tour 6

CoCKaToo

p24

2.30 pm

arTisT performanCe: dora garCÍa, WHAT A fuCKIng WOndeRfuL AudIenCe

mCa

p47

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

biennale film program: enTR’ACTe; L’Age d’OR

agnsw

p79

biennale film program: ROCKIng THe fOundATIOnS

agnsw

p79

11 am + 3.30 pm

youTh guides gallery Tours

mCa

p50

11.30 am–12.30 pm

mysTery Tour 7

CoCKaToo

p24

1–3 pm

weeKend arT sessions

mCa

p49

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

11 am + 3.30 pm

youTh guides gallery Tours

mCa

p50

1–3 pm

weeKend arT sessions

mCa

p48

2 pm

biennale film program: ROCKIng THe fOundATIOnS

agnsw

p79

SUNDAY 3 AUGUST

TUESDAY 5 AUGUST 10.30–11.30 am WEDNESDAY 6 AUGUST 2 pm + 7.15 pm THURSDAY 7 AUGUST 10–11.30 am FRIDAY 8 AUGUST 10.30–11.30 am SATURDAY 9 AUGUST

SUNDAY 10 AUGUST 2 pm WEDNESDAY 13 AUGUST 2 pm + 7.15 pm SATURDAY 16 AUGUST

SUNDAY 17 AUGUST

2008 biennale of sydney guide

evenTs Calendar 2008 biennale of sy augusT–sepTember evenTs date/time

all evenTs are FREE unless oTherwise sTaTed on evenTs pages

event information

venue

biennale film program: ZeRO fOR COnduCT; LA JeTÉe

agnsw

more info

WEDNESDAY 20 AUGUST 2 pm + 7.15 pm

p79+80

SATURDAY 23 AUGUST 10 am

lord mayor’s CommuniTy aCCess day: lord mayor’s opening address / auslan Tour

pier 2/3

p31

11 am

lord mayor’s CommuniTy aCCess day: audio-desCribed and auslan Tour

mCa

p49

11 am

lord mayor’s CommuniTy aCCess day: Tour for people wiTh inTelleCTual disabiliTies

agnsw

p80

11.30 am–12.30 pm

mysTery Tour 8

CoCKaToo

p24

12.30 pm

lord mayor’s CommuniTy aCCess day: audio-desCribed Tour

pier 2/3

p31

1.30 pm

lord mayor’s CommuniTy aCCess day: auslan Tour

agnsw

p80

2 pm

lord mayor’s CommuniTy aCCess day: audio-desCribed and auslan Tour

mCa

p49

3.30 pm

lord mayor’s CommuniTy aCCess day: audio-desCribed Tour

agnsw

p80

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

biennale film program: ZeRO fOR COnduCT; LA JeTÉe

agnsw

p79+80

biennale film program: THe BATTLe Of ALgIeRS

agnsw

p80

11.30 am–12.30 pm

mysTery Tour 9

CoCKaToo

p24

1–2 pm

floorTalK: heTTi perKins on doreen reid naKamarra

pier 2/3

p31

2.30 pm

arTisT performanCe: dora garCÍa, WHAT A fuCKIng WOndeRfuL AudIenCe

mCa

p47

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

biennale film program: THe BATTLe Of ALgIeRS

agnsw

p80

mCa

p49

10–11.30 am + 12.30–2 pm biennale bella worKshop

mCa

p49

2–3.30 pm

mCa

p49

10–11.30 am + 12.30–2 pm biennale bella worKshop

mCa

p49

2 + 7.15 pm

biennale film program: If…

agnsw

p80

2–4 pm

liam gilliCK, ReLATIOnS Of eQuIVALenCe: THRee POTenTIAL endIngS

agnsw

p74

10–11.30 am + 12.30–2 pm biennale bella worKshop

mCa

p49

2–4 pm

agnsw

p74

SUNDAY 24 AUGUST 2 pm WEDNESDAY 27 AUGUST 2 + 7.15 pm SATURDAY 30 AUGUST

SUNDAY 31 AUGUST 2 pm MONDAY 1 SEPTEMBER 10–11.30 am + 12.30–2 pm biennale bella worKshop TUESDAY 2 SEPTEMBER arT baby

WEDNESDAY 3 SEPTEMBER

THURSDAY 4 SEPTEMBER liam gilliCK, ReLATIOnS Of eQuIVALenCe: THRee POTenTIAL endIngS

FRIDAY 5 SEPTEMBER 10–11.30 am + 12.30–2 pm biennale bella worKshop

mCa

p49

2–4 pm

liam gilliCK, ReLATIOnS Of eQuIVALenCe: THRee POTenTIAL endIngS

agnsw

p74

3–5 pm

emerging arTisTs and CuraTors forum

CoCKaToo

p25

11.30 am–12.30 pm

mysTery Tour 10

CoCKaToo

p24

1.30 pm

biennale film program: LA RÉgIOn CenTRALe

agnsw

p80

3–4.30 pm

auCTion: sharmila samanT, gILT

mCa

p47

3.30 pm

revoluTionary reading

mCa

p48

biennale film program: If…

agnsw

p80

SATURDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

SUNDAY 7 SEPTEMBER 2 pm

CoCKaToo Cockatoo island pp8–25 pier 2/3 pier 2/3, walsh bay pp26–31 agnsw art gallery of new south wales pp58–81 mCa museum of Contemporary art pp32–51

arTspaCe artspace pp82–86 soh sydney opera house pp52–55 CbT Cell block Theatre p87 baCh dang bach dang vietnamese restaurant p87

2008 biennale of sydney guide

ydney CaTalogue 2008 biennale of sy

2008 biennale of sydney: ReVOLuTIOnS – fORMS THAT TuRn Hardcover, 304 pages RRP $59.95 (incl. GST) Co-published with Thames & Hudson ISBN 9780500976845

The 2008 Biennale of Sydney catalogue is a unique publication, a meditation in drawings and texts on the theme, Revolutions – Forms That Turn. Conceived by 2008 artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev as an artists’ book, it includes drawings, notations and sketches by 138 artists. More than 70 living artists have created new drawings especially for this publication, including Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Jeremy Deller, Shaun Gladwell, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Jonas, Brian Jungen, Jannis Kounellis, Tracey Moffatt, Reinhard Mucha, Giuseppe Penone, Dan and Lia Perjovschi, Nedko Solakov, Mike Parr, William Kentridge and Lawrence Weiner. Existing drawings by historic artists such as Alexander Calder, Leonardo da Vinci, Marcel Duchamp, Len Lye, Kasimir Malevich, Gordon MattaClark, Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin are also included. An anthology of revolutionary writings by both historic and contemporary authors – such as Dante Alighieri, Giorgio Agamben, Charles Perkins, Maximilien Robespierre, Chantal Mouffe and Gertrude Stein – frames the exhibition concept and drawings. Original essays by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Jonathan Crary, Iwona Blazwick and Charles Harrison, and contributions by Iara Boubnova, Natasha Conland, Massimiliano Gioni, Raimundas Malašauskas, Jessica Morgan, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hetti Perkins, Kathryn Smith, Russell Storer and Jane Taylor, take the reader on a journey through revolutionary thought and form. Order online at: bos2008.com/page/2008_catalogue. html

2008 biennale of sydney guide

rons benefaCTors & proJeCT paTrons The biennale of sydney ThanKs all our generous supporTers: founding governor

Franco Belgiorno-Nettis AC CBE ambassadors

Amina Belgiorno-Nettis Luca and Anita Belgiorno-Nettis Andrew and Cathy Cameron Kingsley, Robyn, Jeremy, Donna and Chris Mundey Geoff and Vicki Ainsworth The Arcus Foundation Phillip Keir and Sarah Benjamin Ivan and Karel Wheen Michael Whitworth and Candice Bruce 2008 proJeCT paTrons

Anonymous Bligh Voller Nield Architecture, Sydney Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing Bose Pacia Gallery, New York Blum & Poe, Los Angeles Andrew and Cathy Cameron Francesca Cilluffo and Angelo Chianale Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art The Ellipse Foundation – Contemporary Art Collection, Portugal Farrell Family Foundation John Kaldor and Naomi Milgrom Kaldor Keir Foundation David Leach and Tony Kenny Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris Porter’s Paints Amici Sostenitori del Castello di Rivoli, Turin Anna Schwartz

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation The Project, New York The Technical Direction Company of Australia, Sydney Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna Viglietta Matteo Spa Yvon Lambert, Paris and New York benefaCTors

Ari and Lisa Droga Robert and Annabelle Hansen The Balnaves Foundation Lisa and Egil Paulsen Simpsons Solicitors Ginny and Leslie Green Colin and Elizabeth Laverty Ezekiel Solomon Claire Armstrong and John Sharpe Art World Magazine Andrew and Andrea Banks Anthony Bertini Martin Browne Richard and Anne Campbell Mark and Tanya Carnegie Anne Marie and Tim Casey Chartwell Trust Angela Clark Robin Crawford and Judy Joye Helen Eager and Christopher Hodges Luke Fildes Rick and Jan Frolich Jenny Gibbs Lisa and Danny Goldberg GRANTPIRRIE Julian and Stephanie Grose Greg Hargrave Mike and Jill Hawker Jane and Simon Hayman

Hal Herron Dr Ian Hill and Morna Seres Sharon and Peter Ivany AO David and Angela Kent Julian and Lizanne Knights David and Megan Laidlaw Ann Lewis AM Dayle Mace Robyn and Mitchel Martin-Weber Odetta Medich Jan Minchin Mark and Louise Nelson Clinton Ng Dick Quan Reg and Sally Richardson Penelope Seidler Jennifer Stafford and Jonathan Nicholson Miriam and Les Stein Tony and Josephine Sukkar Irene Sutton Thames & Hudson Australia Lucy Turnbull Roslyn Weiley Ray Wilson OAM wiTh supporT also from

Bodhi Art, Mumbai Trevor and Carole Chappell Penny Clive Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid Hauser and Wirth, Zurich Lisson Gallery, London The Hon Justice Michael Moore Mori Gallery, Sydney Rent-A-Garden, Terrey Hills Salon 94, New York Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo Ian Oatley Tony and Josephine Sukkar Guido and Michelle Belgiorno-Nettis

2008 biennale of sydney guide

CulTural funding CulTural funding The biennale of sydney is pleased To aCKnowledge The generous supporT of The following parTiCipaTing governmenTs and organisaTions ThaT have assisTed in The presenTaTion of The eXhibiTion: ausTralia

Australia-China Council Australia-India Council Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency (QIAMEA) belgium

Agency for Arts and Heritage Flemish Ministry of Culture, Youth, Sports and Media

hungary

porTugal

Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange

Ministério da Cultura, Instituto de Arte Contemporânea

ireland

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

Culture Ireland iTaly

Direzione generale per la qualità e la tutela del paesaggio, l’architettura e l’arte contemporanee Compagnia di San Paolo

Canada

Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada

Italian Institute of Culture, Sydney

Luso-American Development Foundation romania

Romanian Cultural Institute singapore

National Arts Council slovenia

Canada Council for the Arts

The Japan Foundation, Sydney

Ministry of Culture, Government of the Republic of Slovenia

British Columbia Arts Council

meXiCo

spain

franCe

Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes

Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior (SEACEX)

neTherlands

sweden

Mondriaan Foundation

Moderna Museet

new Zealand

swiTZerland

Creative New Zealand

Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council

norway

usa

Office for Contemporary Art Norway

Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, United States Department of State

CULTURESFRANCE Embassy of France in Australia, Cultural and Scientific Section germany

Federal Foreign Office IFA (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) Goethe-Institut Australien

Japan

The Biennale of Sydney gratefully acknowledges all contributors, friends and volunteers. 2008 biennale of sydney guide

arTspaCe arT gallery of new souTh wales royal boTaniC gardens sydney opera house museum of ConTemporary arT pier 2/3, walsh bay CoCKaToo island bos2008.Com/revoluTionsonline

ausTraliaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fesTival of ConTemporary arT

visiT all The venues!