Fiona Hall to Represent Australia at 56th Venice Biennale

The Australia Council for the Arts has announced that veteran Australian artist Fiona Hall will represent Australia at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

Hall will be the first artist to occupy the new Australia Pavilion, designed by architects Denton Corker Marshall, the construction of which will commence early next year.

Speaking in Sydney last week, the 60-year-old Hall confessed that she had not visited the Venice Biennale before this year. “I thought it should at least be one of the things I do before I die,” she told ArtAsiaPacific. It was just three days before boarding the plane to Italy that Hall received the phone call from Australia’s Venice Biennale 2015 commissioner, Simon Mordant, informing her that she had been selected.

Mordant now faces the task of raising funds to realize Hall’s work, which will be a multimedia installation, including an audio component. In an attempt to familiarize herself with a space that has not yet been built, the Adelaide-based artist has been spending time in the Level 1 Gallery of the new Mordant Wing of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the dimensions of which are similar to those of the pavilion.

Michael Young is contributing editor for ArtAsiaPacific.