Stunning Sydney Biennale opens this week

18th Biennale of Sydney
Various locations
Sydney
June 27- September 16

The exhibition attendant was warning visitors to stay inside the disused industrial workshop. It was too dangerous outside, she said. It wasn’t just the torrential Sydney rain which was making it dangerous, it was the dense fog which had suddenly descended on the area.

Walking in the fog was dangerous. You could hardly see your hand in front of you. It was physically and psychologically disorienting. Then it lifted as suddenly as it had arrived.

This was no natural phenomenon, though. It was the work of Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya, an installation where he uses a form of cloud machine to make dense fogs which can settle in limited areas.

The experience is playful and threatening as well as disorienting.

This is one of the 200 works at the 18th Biennale of Sydney which opened to the public this week. One hundred artists from 44 countries are taking part in one of the longest-running major international art events – trumped only by the Sao Paulo Biennale and the Venice Biennale.

It is expected that more than half a million people will visit the four main venues, Cockatoo Island, The Gallery of New South Wales, Pier 2/3 and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

New Zealand is represented by three artists: Peter Robinson (our representative at the 2001 Venice Biennale), Tiffany Singh and Sriwhana Spong.

Robinson’s installation in one of the big industrial halls on Cockatoo Island, just indoors from the Nakaya cloud work, is massive, dwarfing the huge pieces of industrial machinery it sprawls over.

Robinson employs his now signature lengths of carved polystyrene lengths of chain which range in size from delicate necklace-like pieces through to industrial-scale ones.

There are also massive plinth-like pieces which look as though they have been roughly hewn in preparation for future carving of replicas of the industrial tools and machines which fill the space.

The use of the chains seems appropriate as Cockatoo was a convict island, with many of the prisoners working in these areas, shackled.

The work is particularly successful because the chains have an industrial appearance and the pristine white contrasts with the dark, patinaed metal objects.

Unlike some of his earlier exhibitions, where the chains and mounds of polystyrene seemed to merely inhabit spaces, this work attacks and transforms the objects and the space.

Tiffany Singh has two large installations, one at Pier 2/3 and another on Cockatoo Island. The one at Pier 2/3 features 1000 bamboo wind chimes hanging from coloured ribbons. They are available for visitors to take away, decorate and then return to the other exhibition space on Cockatoo.

This audience participation means the Pier 2/3 venue will progressively lose the hanging works and they will hopefully be installed on the island.

But, presumably, those that are taken home will be part of a wider participatory exhibition which people will be part of.

This notion of audience involvement and participation is one of the major themes of the Biennale, which is subtitled All Our Relations, with ideas about interaction, migration, cultural change and sharing of ideas.

Several other artists have exhibitions where they share their work with the public.

Australian Nadia Myre has her Scar Project, in which she provides small canvasses on which participants embroid significant events in their lives. The canvas is then added to the expanding collection of works.

Erin Manning from Canada has an exhibition of 1000 pieces of fabric which have been embellished with embroidery, buttons and magnets. These are available for the participants to take with them after they have made additions to the fabric.

The installation which is the simplest and most intriguing of these is Lee Mingwie’s The Mending Project, where the artist uses the simple elements of thread, colour and sewing to look at personal and social relationships.

Visitors can bring damaged pieces of clothing or textile, choose the colour of thread and watch as the garment is mended. The mended article, with thread ends still attached, are placed together on the table to be collected on the last day of the exhibition.

More on the 18th Biennale of Sydney in NBR Weekend Review.