HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 2005 MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL VISUAL ARTS PROGRAM
Like Alice in Wonderland, we felt spaces opening up, shrinking and leading us to new realms in the 2005 Melbourne International Festival Visual Arts Program. Spaces seemed to expand and contract under the pressure of some works, while others lured us into the ambivalent zones, locked deep within the psyche, where innocence, desire and violence merge. These sites of fantasy, contemplation, humour, illusion and cultural difference made Juliana Engberg’s final visual arts program for the Melbourne Festival a delicious mixed bag of multi-sensory treats.
Two very different installations at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), both specially commissioned for the festival, forged a fascinating dialogue about the limits and possibilities of art, perception and space. Nothing was what it seemed in Callum Morton’s Babylonia (2005). This thirteen metre long island cave, inspired by the world of James Bond, kitsch theme park rides and Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1963 film, L’Avventura, rose up out of the glossy black sea of ACCA’s exhibition hall. The name of Morton’s desolate rock, Babylonia, brought to mind ancient kingdoms, seats of luxury and corruption, or places of exile and loss. However, we soon discovered that Morton’s island was formed out of a much more complex and paradoxical conceptual terrain. Muffled creaks, rumbles and groans were the only forms of life which were immediately apparent on the barren island. The large polystyrene blocks that were stacked, shaped and heavily worked with paint and lacquer to form the island cave’s mass absorbed the eerie sounds which emanated from somewhere inside. It was only when we moved around one side of the island, where a small door could be found, that we were given the opportunity to explore the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline