18th Biennale of Sydney
‘All Our Relations’, the 18th Biennale of Sydney, was the brainchild of collaborators Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster. They brought together the work of more than one hundred artists from over forty-four countries to serve their curatorial concept of collectivity and connection. Their Biennale ‘focuses on inclusionary practices of generative thinking, such as collaboration, conversation and compassion, in the face of coercion and destruction’.1 It was avowedly opposed to catastrophe theory, fragmentation and isolation of the individual and, while some exhibits reflected destructive forces and social disruption, they did so to illuminate fraught situations, conveyed through often deeply affective storytelling. Acknowledging the current compulsion for connectivity and relation, this Biennale was above all democratic. It was about exchange, mutuality and accessibility.
Within this seemingly gentle, idealistic and non-bombastic framework, a multiplicity of practices was evident both from the mainstream and the so-called periphery. Knowing that over the course of the twentieth century, projects happening in the margins have come to shape the mainstream (feminism, for instance) and that countries hardly registering in linear accounts of art history have come into common alignment with those which have a firm place within it, de Zegher and McMaster chose artists from as wide a spectrum as, for instance, Syria and Ghana, Canada and Thailand, the United States and The Netherlands, China and Spain, Uruguay and Britain, Australia, Sweden and South Korea. Mostly the work is recent and by living artists.
Several trajectories unfolded in this Biennale of ‘interconnectivity’, one being the realm of science, to which Philip Beesley’s spectacular Hylozoic Series: Sibyl (2012) belongs. Situated in one of the industrial spaces on Cockatoo Island, this wondrously spectral light-filled structure was