By Nanette Orly — 22 May, 2020
The 22nd Biennale of Sydney (BoS) attracted much anticipation and excitement in 2018, not only in the appointment of Wiradjuri artist Brook Andrew as artistic director, but also for the First Nations title and theme of NIRIN—a Wiradjuri word that can be translated to ‘edge’. Finally, after forty-seven years since the BoS’s inception, this international…
By Paul Kelaita — 12 October, 2018
There’s a provocative question asked in one of the many video works in The Public Body .03 that lasts for only a second—‘but what if a species is nothing more than a set of relationships?’ The question appears in Korakrit Arunanondchai’s ‘with history in a room filled with people with funny names 4’ (2017), a…
By Lauren Carroll Harris — 4 May, 2018
A sweaty young Kiwi woman in sneakers and leggings is perched on a mountain over Anzac Cove, tracing the same steps as 12,000 other Australian and New Zealand pilgrims every year. Her great-uncle died at age 19 on the Western Front, and she has travelled here to remember his generation. But in a moment of…
By Naomi Riddle — 20 April, 2018
‘Dear to me is sleep, dearer still being made of stone.’ Michelangelo Buonarroti, Buonarroti’s Reply (1545-46) I kept thinking of two of Jenny Holzer’s most well-known phrases whilst watching Geng Xue’s video work Poetry of Michelangelo (2015), now showing at Artspace as part of the Sydney Biennale: the first, ‘it is in your self-interest…
By Snack Syndicate — 19 January, 2018
This text is in dialogue with Helen Johnson’s Warm Ties (Artspace). The exhibition, comprising six paintings, critically reimagines scenes of settlement and its afterlife in Australia. Major and minor histories are layered on large-scale canvases – theatrical backgrounds that make the viewer a player. Hand The figurative finger or index of epistemic anxiety. One…