The Biennale Experience

The 20th Biennale of Sydney

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The idea of an art biennale grew out of the trade fair and is shading into the notion of a theme park. Its brief has been to bring to the spectator an ‘experience’ larger than the particular art works, displayed in a cornucopia of curatorial offerings that extends to the city itself. As a water city with layered industrial histories, Sydney—like Venice, the original and still the most famous of biennales—has wonderful natural spectacle to work with.

The 2016 Biennale of Sydney was strung, as were previous biennales, between several sites: the Art Gallery of New South Wale, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Carriageworks, Artspace and Cockatoo Island. There were also exhibits and activities scattered throughout other venues in the city.

The Mortuary Station, now lying ignored on a rail siding just along from busy Central Station, became briefly illuminated with the extraordinary: poetic renditions of the thought of death. In each of the old waiting rooms, where Victorian patrons would have awaited the trains that took them to Rookwood Cemetery for their lugubrious celebrations, projections were set up around pages of a Buddhist text for the dead. Seated as if waiting, the viewer was instructed (choose your next birth carefully) and warned (a dark cave or forest may lead to taking an animal’s soul). Over the platform outside, large cone spirals of incense were hanging and effusing the air with the strange scent of ceremony, completing Charwei Tsai’s Spiral Incense Bardo. At the entrance to the station, cages of mynah birds ate sculptures of hands formed of birdseed, literally ‘biting the hand that fed…’, in Marco Chiandetti’s installation, The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Taro Shinoda, Abstraction of Confusion, 2016. Clay, pigment, ochre, tatami mats, dimensions variable. Installation view of the 20th Biennale of Sydney 2016 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Courtesy the artist. Created for the 20th Biennale of Sydney. Photograph Ben Symons.

Bharti Kher, Six Women, 2013–15. Plaster of Paris, wood, metal, approximately 123 x 61 x 95.5cm each. Installation view of the 20th Biennale of Sydney 2016. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London and Zurich. Photograph Leïla Joy.