ArtAsiaPacific: Highlights From The Biennale Of Sydney2018

Finnish artist EIJA-LIISA AHTILA’s Potentiality for Love (2018), displayed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, was an expansive moving-image work, screened over 22 superimposed LED modules that showed a female figure floating through the milkyway. All photos by Michael Young for ArtAsiaPacific.

This year’s Biennale of Sydney (BoS) brought no shortage of anticipation, not only because 2018 marked the event’s 21st birthday, but also because this edition was the first in the biennale’s 45-year history to be helmed by an Asian artistic director, Mami Kataoka, chief curator of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. Yet, despite the high hopes of the show’s organizers and visitors alike, BoS 2018—titled “Superposition: Equilibrium and Engagement”—was, overall, an underwhelming show.

The headline work by artist and activist Ai Weiwei, Law of the Journey (2017), was created to raise awareness of the ongoing refugee crisis that has seen 65 million people displaced worldwide. The installation, a 70-meter-long lifeboat made of black rubber that is packed with figures of the same material, was transported to Cockatoo Island, a UNESCO world heritage site in the middle of Sydney Harbour, for the show. A work that first premiered in March 2017 at the National Gallery in Prague, it was an obvious choice that capitalized on rather than contributed to a nuanced discussion of the sensationalized topic. Also included was Ai’s Crystal Ball (2017), a two-ton crystal ball nestled on a bed of lift jackets, on display at Artspace. Its conceptual intention to reveal an inverted world was so apparent that it made one cringe and ask, “Is this really the best the biennale can offer?”

Thankfully, beyond Ai’s anchor piece at Cockatoo Island, there were a handful of noteworthy works. Of the seven participating venues, Carriageworks was by far the standout, with its eight installations given space to breathe within the airy halls. On view was French conceptualist Laurent Grasso’s disturbing but captivating video work Untitled (2018), an apocalyptic vision filmed in the Australian outback. Indigenous artist George Tjungurrayi’s breathtakingly beautiful paintings with linear patterns based on Indigenous Dreamtime stories were also featured. Cockatoo Island, once the star attraction of recent biennales, seems dejected and forlorn compared with the showstoppers at Carriageworks this year.

Nearby, the Art Gallery of New South Wales offered a considered presentation, including Flemish visual artist Lili Dujourie’s minimalist American Imperialism (1972), a large, rusty, steel sheet leaning against a vivid red wall, and although shoe-horned into an uncomfortable space at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australian interdisciplinary artist Brook Andrew’s What’s Left Behind (2018) is a masterful, expansive, collaborative installation, comprising archival objects, which effectively interrogate Western colonial narratives.

Here are some of the highlights from BoS 2018.

CERCLE D’ART DES TRAVAILLEURS DE PLANTATION CONGOLAISE (CATPC), and BALOJI and RENZO MARTENS’s Untitled (2018) was on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Founded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2014, CATPC is a cooperative that develops new economic initiatives through participation in the global art market. The video Untitled is an allegorical love story, representing the fraught relationship between art institutions and the Congo plantation system.

Indigenous elder ESME TIMBERY is recognised for her decorative shell models, continuing the shell-work tradition associated with the Aboriginal community. Shellworked Slippers (2008), is an installation of 200 pairs of delicately worked children’s slippers, on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The empty shoes are a poignant reminder of the suffering experienced by Aboriginal people in Australia.

The Museum of Contemporary Art featured BROOK ANDREW’s What’s Left Behind (2018), a lavish, discursive, collaborative installation that examines memory and alternative histories through archival and vernacular objects and photographs housed in beautifully made sculptural vitrines. The contents of the vitrines are drawn from the archives of the Sydney Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences.

LIZA LOU’s The Clouds (2015–18), on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art, comprises a panoramic grid of 600 cloths, each hand-woven with glass beads and created in collaboration with a team of Zulu artisans, exploring process, materiality and labor.

At Cockatoo Island was MIT JAI INN’s Planes (Hover, Erupt, Erode) (2018). The Thai artist investigates materiality through a labor-intensive process in which he adds, augments, overlays and erases pigment. Huge canvases hang from the roof beams or lie stretched over a table in an explosion of colour.

TIFFANY CHUNG, featured at Artspace, explores global issues of migration and displacement with Reconstructing an Exodus History: Boat Trajectories, Ports of First Asylum and Resettlement Countries (2017). The Vietnamese artist’s beautiful work of embroidery charts the course of Vietnamese refugees who escaped the country between 1975 and ’96.

Carriageworks exhibited late Chinese artist CHEN SHAOXIONG’s The Views (2016). This four-channel video is one of the final pieces the artist created prior to his death in 2016. In his works, beauty is drawn from ordinary events that add an otherwise unseen richness to everyday life, including leafless trees in winter, magpies balancing on branches and people pushing bicycles.

French artist and filmmaker LAURENT GRASSO’s film Untitled (2018), delivers a sinister exposition suggestive of an impending apocalypse. Dramatically scored and filmed in outback Australia, this dark and tense yet curiously uplifting film was one of the stand-out works of BoS 2018.

Australian Indigenous artist GEORGE TJUNGURRAYI’s series of abstract, untitled paintings were shown at Carriageworks. The detailed patterns reference the energy fields of the artist’s ancestral lands.

Michael Young is a contributing editor of ArtAsiaPacific.

The Biennale of Sydney 2018 is on view at various locations throughout Sydney until June 11, 2018.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.

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Dec 2017

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Highlights from The Biennale of Sydney 2018