17th Biennale of Sydney

First published on 22 Feb 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

Held every two years, the Biennale of Sydney stages a three-month exhibition, plus a programme of special events, public tours, artist talks, film screenings and international guest lectures across Sydney - and admission to the exhibition and these events is FREE. In 2010, the 17th Biennale of Sydney will be situated across the heart of the city in a series of venues:

Cockatoo Island - Cai Guo-Qiang's 'Inopportune: Stage One' (2004) is the spectacular centrepiece of the many artworks displayed on the island for the Biennale. Free ferries to the island are running from Commissioners Steps, Circular Quay.
Pier 2/3 - Paul McCarthy and other leading artists are exhibiting in the cavernous Pier 2/3 space. The Pier can be accessed on foot or via free ferry from Commissioners Steps, Circular Quay.
Museum of Contemporary Art - the Biennale of Sydney continues its longstanding association with the MCA, which has dedicated all four levels to showcasing the work of 94 Australian and international contemporary artists. Artists include Louise Bourgeois, the Chapman Brothers, Brett Graham, Steve McQueen, David Noonan, Roxy Paine, Shen Shaomin, Fred Tomaselli and Bill Viola.
Sydney Opera House,
Royal Botanic Gardens,
Artspace, and
The Art Gallery of NSW - Works by Japanese artist Hisashi Tenmyouya and Chinese artist Wang Qingsong.

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A world of exciting art will invade Sydney this May, says the Biennale's Artistic Director David Elliot.

David, when planning something as major as the Biennale of Sydney, what's the first step? Well you have to come up with some ideas. Then you need to start doing the research, putting some flesh on those ideas. You could just go through your address book, but I'm not very interested in that. Of course, I'm showing artists who I've worked with in the past, but also people I haven't worked with before: people from this country and this region.  

The Biennale is subtitled The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age. What is the "Beauty of Distance"? It's looking at beauty as being an important element of art and not an obsolete term. And then this whole idea of distance: how distance has changed, because of mass travel and real-time communication. I think that not very long ago, in the colonial world, people regarded distance with a degree of melancholy, because it meant they were cut off from the motherland. That's no longer the case. Actually, it's a positive thing to have the space to be who you want to be, and not to have baggage.

The show is really looking at where we are now. We're at the end of the European Age of Enlightenment and at the beginning of something else and we don't really know what it is. It's about power: how power has changed, has moved.

How does that idea of global power shifts play out in some of the artists in the show? There's a lot of non-Western artists. Cai Guo-Qiang is making a huge work on terrorism, with nine cars rotating through space on Cockatoo Island. He was born in China, lived for 12 years in Japan, and now lives in New York. Isaac Julien, who's a British artist of Caribbean parenthood, is a making a ten-channel video installation about Chinese economic migrants in Britain who died in a tragedy. So you've got a black English guy making a thing about Chinese migrant workers. And there are many examples of that.

What about the idea of "songs of survival"? It's making an analogy between art and music, and between folk art and folk music. When you become urban you forget these old ways; you have rationalist knowledge and new systems of doing things. And basically we're going back to a pre-Enlightened way of looking at things. At least, recognising that encyclopaedias are close cousins of prisons.

For instance, indigenousness is a subject you can't avoid in Australia, quite rightly. There's a lot of indigenous art in the show - because it's good art, not because it's indigenous! We're showing Inuit artists from northwest Canada, traditional and also non-traditional.

We hear a Finnish "shouting choir" will be appearing. Mieskuoro Huutajat was started at the end of the 80s by Petri Sirviö. It started in a vaguely satirical way, taking famous songs and shouting them rhythmically. There's a strong choral tradition in Scandinavia and it's a sort of parody of the traditional choir. They do ‘The Star Spangled Banner' shouted, and I'm sure they're going to do something Australian. 

Are they a music act, or performance art? Both. Certainly they take themselves very seriously; they're not a joke.  

Still, you've said the theme of the ‘Trickster' will be part of the Biennale. The figure of the trickster appears in nearly all cultures, in one way or another, and they're the kind of disruptive element, people who turn logic on its head, and mix up the world. [Canadian artist] Skeena Reece has done a series of performances based on the Hopi Indian figure of the sacred clown.

American artist Paul McCarthy is kind of a clown too: what can we expect to see from him? He's bringing ‘Ship of Fools No.2'. It's a large, urethane foam structure. The figures in it are based on German porcelain figurines of the 30s and 40s - Nazi-period kitsch.

What are your impressions of Cockatoo Island as a venue? It's sensational, really sensational, because there are so many different kinds of space on the island. I've been using the bungalows at the top, putting paintings in them or drawings, sometimes video work. And down on the flat there are these big industrial spaces, like the big Turbine Hall, which is so beautiful.

What do people get when they hire you as a curator, that they wouldn't get from other curators? Talent!

Anything else? Biennales should be really contemporary, involved with what artists are actually doing now. Biennales happen in places, so the Biennale should always be in conversation with the place. I think that's very important. I try to make a coherent exhibition. And I try to enable people to experience the art for themselves. There's nothing in this Biennale that isn't really worth taking a good, long, hard look at and thinking about just in itself.

What other artists in the Biennale are you particularly excited about? All of them!... There's a room full of 110 Yolgnu funeral poles that are very, very powerful, they have a very strong presence. Then in the next room you'll find seven bronze sculptures by Louise Bourgeois; they're kind of standing figures, and they also have this incredible presence. Between them is a series of dance masks by a Northwest Canadian artist, Beau Dick, who is a shaman. He innovates within traditional art. Tradition very rarely stays still. If it does, it's dead. Nick Dent