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 Naomi Riddle — 21 February, 2020
The Museum of Contemporary Art’s summer exhibition, Cornelia Parker, is a retrospective of the celebrated British artist’s work. Parker is the tenth artist to feature in the Sydney International Art Series—an initiative undertaken in partnership with the NSW Government to bring internationally recognised artists to Australian audiences. Parker is best known for her large-scale installations,…
By Chloe Watfern — 16 October, 2019
The social organism is a scribbled line. It’s a line passed from hand to hand across a big sheet of paper. It means nothing and everything. Deep in the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), behind the double glass doors of the National Centre for Creative Learning, a man is drawing a rocket. The rocket is…
By Lucie Reeves-Smith — 13 August, 2019
A fortnight of equatorial downpours preceded the opening of Michael Armitage’s solo exhibition, The Promised Land, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. With a heavy blanket of humidity cast across the city, this oppressive atmosphere seemed to sit comfortably alongside the bright colours and rotting surfaces of his paintings. Slick and warm, the…
By Soo-Min Shim — 7 June, 2019
This is the third instalment of Running Dog’s feature series responding to individual works in The National 2019: New Australian Art—on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art, and curated by Isobel Parker Philip (AGNSW), Daniel Mudie Cunningham (Carriageworks), Clothilde Bullen and Anna Davis (MCA). After…
By Prue Gibson — 29 March, 2019
Artist Janet Laurence’s multi-species survey exhibition has now launched at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Having exhibited work for over thirty years, Laurence presents a kind of secret charm that is difficult to define. It’s a combination of serious earnestness, childlike joy and fearful knowing. By this I mean that she has read the…
By Susie Anderson — 20 September, 2018
two ways at Maningrida they never stopped climbing trees found a way to keep mardayin ceremony but some were taken too unscroll bark canvas work with fire smell thick in air on walls Ngalyod rainbow serpent bodies coiled together power in its bones these words are better poetry all I know is only written but…
By Soo-Min Shim — 30 May, 2018
In one of the opening scenes of Billy Wilder’s archetypal film, Double Indemnity (1944), the protagonist Walter Neff walks around an unassuming living room typical of the late 1930s. He strolls nonchalantly past an armchair and two everyday lamps, but an ominous feeling still pervades the scene. A long shot frames Walter, causing the shadows…
By Cleo Mees — 5 January, 2018
I go into Sip My Ocean, the Pipilotti Rist retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, expecting to encounter some ‘Big Time Sensuality’. This was the title of an earlier review of Rist’s work published in 2011 by The Guardian, and it struck me at the time as a direct reference to the Björk song…