The Sydney Biennale 2016

Sydney Biennale, at various locations until June 5

The Sydney Biennale is one of the more important international art events and is particularly relevant to New Zealand and the Pacific. It is always big, scattered over several sites around the city and this year there are major concentrations at Carriageworks, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Gallery of New South Wales, Artspace, Cockatoo Island, and a few other sites. There are more than 80 artists from 34 countries but, in line with the biennale’s title, the quality of the works is not evenly distributed.

The most substantial and rewarding exhibition is titled Embassy of the Spirits at The Gallery of New South Wales, a show that explores the intersection between the spiritual, the philosophical and the cultural.

As biennale artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal notes, “the early 21st century has seen a dangerous return to faith-based political conviction, with various belief structures becoming associated with extreme views and violent and harmful acts that impinge on our everyday life.”

The artists in this show look at what religion and spirituality mean for us today whether it is in the form of Buddhism, radical Islam or fundamentalist Christianity, animism or homeopathy. They also highlight the flaws and limitations of such belief systems whereby people are captured or captivated by either primitive or irrational. Ideas.

In many ways all the artists in this show are like shamans, early priests, early priests who tried to make sense of their environment, inventing explanations, creating gods and giving names to natural forces.

The large installation of Dane Mitchell’s presents this ambivalence. His work “Remedies for Remembering (Al) and Forgetting (NaCl) consists of some large industrial containers of hundreds of litres of liquid some of which are in the gallery but most of which are outside on one of the terraces.  These liquids are spayed into the atmosphere throughout the day. The Al liquid is said to aid in memory while the NaCl (common salt) is said to have a profound and long lasting effect on the body's metabolic processes and in this case to aid in the erasing of memory.

While believers in homeopathy may see this as some useful intervention, others will see it as a form of quackery or fraud. The work can be seen as a metaphor for the invasive dogma of religions and belief systems

The work is equally a metaphor for the power of art to transform, the idea that we are in a space in which we are remembering and forgetting ideas with an artwork which opens up new possibilities. The work is farther enhanced by the unintentional placement adjacent to the installation of a homeless person’s blue tent outside one of the big windows. There is a sense of wondering whether this is part of the installation, part of the remembering or forgetting.

The most impressive work is “Abstraction of Confusion” by Faro Shinodab who has lined a gallery space with white clay which has cracked and crazed. The space is intended as meditative or thinking space and is reminiscent not only of dried and cracked desert surfaces but also the cracked wall surfaces of churches.

New Zealanders Joyce Campbell and Richard Niania have a series of photographs Taniwha Whakaheke/Taniwha Descending The faux nineteenth century photographic works that combine haunting landscape with an interplay between dreamtime and realism.

The video and performance artist Mella Jaarsma's work, Dogwalk, which is intended as a parody of the catwalk with participants clothe in animal skins. They look as though they are part of a Sacha Baron Cohen version of what passes for a religious ritual imbued with history and meaning.

On Cockatoo Island is the largest of the artworks – Willing to be Vulnerable – an installation by the Korean artist Lee Bul, which fills the main turbine hall. The massive work includes huge sheets of painted canvas and a large silver blimp shape recalling the history of dirigibles form, the disastrous period of the zeppelins and the futuristic forms of future travel.

The scale of the work makes it difficult to comprehend but it looks like a film or a cityscape in the process of being erected or dismantled.

The most accessible and refined work is the installation is “Nowhere and Everywhere at the same time” by William Forsyth, the choreographer who was in New Zealand recently for the performance of his dance work In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.

He developed the piece as a solo dance work but, in this iteration, it is for public interaction. The work consists of dozens of plumb bobs hanging from the ceiling, which are activated by air currents as well as the individuals who become the participants. They are forced to “dance between the sway plumb bobs as they walk through them as though activating or being activated by a force field.

There are a number of works that relate to aboriginal social, political spiritual and cultural issues. Most obvious is Embassy by Richard Bell consisting of a large tent which sits outside the Museum of Contemporary Art. It draws attention to the grievances of aborigines related to dispossession of land and the lack of recognition. More than an art installation, it is the site of speeches and discussions examining topics around aboriginal rights.

Inside the MCA, Daniel Boyd’s series of paintings which are mainly images related to early colonisation. The paintings are composed of black and white dots, bringing together the notions of Impressionism along with Aboriginal dot paintings and the idea of cultural cross-fertilisation.

At Bennelong Point close to the Sydney Opera House, Archie Moore’s work A Home away from Home, (Bennelong/Vera’s Hut) is a replica of a brick and slate hut built in 1790 by Governor Phillip for one of the major aboriginal figures of the area, Woollarawarre Bennelong.

Bennelong became a close friend of Phillip politically and socially so the installation is a reflection on how things changed over the next few hundred years.

John Daly-Peoples travelled to Sydney with the assistance of Destination New South Wales

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