Melbourne International Biennial 1999
In an interview published in early 1999, Juliana Engberg signalled the cultural and conceptual parameters for the Melbourne International Biennial.
... I think for it to be successful from the point of view of local expectation more than international expectation- and that's got to be its major purpose- it has to represent an example of something people have hoped for. And I think people have hoped for an event of scale, that introduces them to interesting international work, that they feel they have some connection with.
And in relation to the title, Signs of Life,
I'm interested in where humanity is up to now, and how we will take ourselves into the next century. I believe that a lot of the artists I'm looking at hold these kinds of questions very dear. There's a strong element of communication in the show, that is personal communication between people, and communication between ourselves and those things that culturally inscribe us: including nature and the environment. These seem to be the most cogent things I'm seeing when I go around. There's a tremendous amount of story telling- for want of a better description- in a lot of the works. People want to tell stories again, recapture some sense of their past, their history through a retelling of things.1
There were several distinguishing factors to this inaugural Melbourne Biennial. It was indeed an event of scale, a vast enterprise that included pavilions from eleven countries as well as the survey exhibition showing the work of thirteen Australian and forty-three international artists. The international component was weighted toward a Northern and Western European representation. The eleven Scandinavian artists made up a substantial proportion of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline