THE 16TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY: REVOLUTIONS – FORMS THAT TURN
The 16th Biennale of Sydney, under the artistic direction of Bulgarian-Italian Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, was an expansive yet tightly bounded episode in the pattern of this multi-venue event. In addition to the usual institutional spaces, access to Pier 2/3 and Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour offered a larger physical platform. With its residues of industry, internment and settlement, Cockatoo Island evoked modern histories which resonated within the Biennale’s thematic focus. While incorporated into an integrated entity, such distinctive sites facilitated discrete curatorial approaches in the selection of works for each locale.
The title, ‘Revolutions – Forms that Turn’, encapsulated Christov-Bakargiev’s programming intent and provided the framework through which audiences were expected to engage with the project and its many works. This concept, in the curator’s expansive interpretation of its linguistic potential, was both the making of the Biennale and also responsible for its risk and pitfalls, being stretched through the full weight of its possible connotations. One of this curator’s strengths, amongst her knowledge of arte povera and her long standing relationships with exhibiting artists such as Pierre Huyghe, William Kentridge and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, is her knowledge of avant garde literature and her pursuit of literary and poetic intersections with the visual arts.
In Sydney, Christov-Bakargiev fulfilled an expressed long-held desire to prepare an exhibition on the notion of ‘revolutions and the ambiguous, double meaning of this word’.1 Australia, with its upside down polarity to Europe and historical displacement of indigenous inhabitants under colonial rule, apparently offered an appropriate stage for the curator to indulge in a linguistic flip of revolution into repetition. Her pursuit of this duality derived from the origin of the word ‘revolution’... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline