The 13th Biennale of Sydney storytelling
The notion- as articulated in the theme of this exhibition- that the world is a complex of intersecting narratives whose truth-value is not absolute but relative is hardly novel. In some ways, this notion is itself one of the legacies of the momentous work of poststructuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault. What is interesting, however, is the reconsideration of this notion at the current historical juncture, when so much poststructuralist critique has been thrown out with the bathwater, when even this exhibition 's curator has lamented theory's ' disenfranchisement' of practice and set out to include works that are not buckling under the expectation that they be ' transgressive' .2
For this Sydney Biennale, the first of the new millennium, appears to strongly reflect an engagement with personal narrative, although without the plaintive tone that characterised much of the viscerally provocative, confessional art of the late 1990s. The narratives inherent in many of the works here are more individual than social, less politically charged, more like reveries that underline how much our world is built upon the stories we tell ourselves, stories about the most banal and everyday facets of life rather than about the big existential or global questions. (For example, no work here addresses the purportedly world-changing consequences of September 11, 2001.) Many works use the intimate personal narrative or small-scale fiction to connect with the broader phenomenon of history, to highlight its temporal and spatial instability. Many works appear to retreat to local, immediate narratives, narratives by word-of-mouth and direct experience, as if these are the only ones that are reliable, for all the other stories that construct our reality are ultimately unverifiable media-product. In a similar... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline