Angelica Mesiti, Mother Tongue, 2017. Still. Two-channel HD colour video and surround sound, 17 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. Commissioned by Aarhus European Capital of Culture 2017 in association with the 2018 Adelaide Biennial. Photograph Bonnie Elliott. ADVENTURES IN -LAND THOUGHTS ON THE ADELAIDE BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART; NGV TRIENNIAL AND THE TWENTY-FIRST , 2018 DAVID CORBET

018 saw an alignment of biennials and triennials that will not be repeated ABAA’s thirtieth anniversary edition curated by Leigh Robb. That year will be for another six years.1 Launched in December 2017, Melbourne’s rounded out, one hopes, with NGVT2. Exciting times in Biennale-land. 2inaugural NGV Triennial (NGVT1) overlapped the March 2018 openings These alignments provide an opportunity to take stock, and perhaps to of the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (ABAA2018) and the twenty-first give thanks that Australia is so richly endowed with so many well-resourced, Biennale of Sydney (BoS21). November saw the opening of the ninth Asia recurrent exhibitions, both internationally and nationally focussed. One might Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9) in Brisbane, too late to be included add the smaller but well-regarded Tarrawarra Biennial to this grouping, and in this article, but promising its well-established depth and excellence. 2019 note that while Darwin, Perth and Hobart do not currently stage equivalent will see the return of Sydney’s The National, and in 2020 the National Gallery events, the Telstras (Telstra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, or of Australia’s fourth National Indigenous Art Triennial (NIAT4) in Canberra NATSIAA) and Darwin Festival, the Perth Festival and MONA FOMA (Hobart) will likely overlap BoS22, to be curated by artist Brook Andrew, alongside the all provide rich visual arts offerings on an annual basis.

74 eyeline 90 The 2017/18 visitor figures are interesting. By the time NGVT1 closed similar events worldwide, and it is only those few cities with dedicated biennial in April 2018, it had attracted a total of 1,231,742 people, with an average pavilions/precincts (such as São Paulo and Venice) which can accurately daily attendance of 10,096, far exceeding anything in the National Gallery measure attendance. These observations are not intended to undermine the of Victoria’s 157-year history, and setting an all-time Australian record for high visitor figures claimed, but to place them in context. Certainly biennials contemporary art. Based on recent precedent, this extraordinary figure is likely exercise a strong additional drawing power for public museums, and generate a to be in the top three worldwide for 2018.2 BoS21 attracted around 850,000, generalised sense that there will be plenty for visitors to see. Extensive public ABAA2018 attracted 240,000 and, based on APT8 (2015/16) figures, APT9 can programs, kids’ workshops and the like add to the buzz, and the NGV and expect around 650,000. Roughly calculated, this amounts to a total of around QAGOMA in particular leverage these factors to deliver highly engaging visitor 3 million visitors across Australia’s four major biennials. Assuming these are experiences. Detailed qualitative surveys are not easily accessible, however it is unique visitors—not such a stretch given their geographical dispersal—the likely that satisfaction levels are generally high across the board. figures suggest that around twelve percent of Australians attended biennials This is not necessarily echoed in critical circles, and anecdotally at least, there of contemporary art in the last year, an astonishing statistic if true. On this are signs of ‘biennial fatigue’, a phenomenon by no means unique to Australia. measure the biennial form would appear to be in rude health, and its audiences The causes of such perceptions are various, and they lead me to suggest that engaged and enthusiastic. However, such figures can be difficult to measure there is a divide between critics and ‘insiders’ on the one hand, and general accurately. In almost all cases (excluding, for example, BoS’s outlying sites contemporary art-interested audiences, particularly younger ones. It is the such as Cockatoo Island) these events are staged in existing public museums former who tend to pore over exhibition themes and curatorial statements, and and galleries, and biennial components sit alongside other offerings, including to examine the overall offering against these stated objectives. For the most permanent collections. Many visitors to Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary part I suggest that ‘punters’ could not care less whether the biennial’s title is Art and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Adelaide’s Art Gallery of South derived from quantum physics (BoS), an allegorical prism (ABAA) or some Australia, Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, and other thematic conceit. A case in point is the title, Superposition: Equilibrium Melbourne’s NGV International are effectively part of the general visitor count, and Engagement, chosen by Artistic Director Mami Kataoka, chief curator of and they may not specifically be there for the biennial. This is broadly true of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, and (scarcely believably) the first ever BoS Artistic

clockwise from top left: Brook Andrew, What’s Left Behind, Tombs of Thought IV (Fire), 2017. Detail. Photograph silversalt photography; Brook Andrew, What’s Left Behind, Tombs of Thought IV (Fire), 2017, Tombs of Thought V (Metal), 2017. Document Photography; Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) with Baloji and Renzo Martens, CATPC – the artists from the plantation. A portrait by Baloji, 2018. Video, 9mins. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous assistance from the Mondriaan Fund. Installation views of the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photographs silversalt photography. Courtesy the artists.

eyeline 90 75 Ryan Gander, Other Places, 2018. An artificial landscape of untouched snow covering a recreation of the terrain of the streets in which the artist played as a child, within which a series of sculptures, gestures and interventions have been situated, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from GrantPirrie Private; Ishikawa Foundation, Okayama, Japan; Taro Nasu; and the British Council. Installation views of the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018) at Cockatoo Island. Photograph silversalt photography. © Ryan Gander. Courtesy the artist, TARO NASU Gallery, Tokyo, and Lisson Gallery, London and New York.

Director of Asian heritage. According to Kataoka’s curatorial statement, the Green also evokes what she calls her ‘touchstone of the past’: exhibition ‘examines the world today by borrowing the word “superposition”, the quantum mechanical term that refers to an overlapping situation’. She also …of visual art’s majestic history as a companion to civilisation; of our evokes the ancient Chinese philosophy of Wuxing in which: great Western cultural tradition of innovation and renewal; and the marvel of our ancient, still-living, Australian Indigenous culture.5 …everything in this world is made up five main elements: wood, fire, earth, metal and water. Each of these elements gives rise to the next Here Green acknowledges AGSA’s long tradition of framing the work of element, either through a process of symbiosis, where one element Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists—particularly artists of South encourages the formation of the others, or a situation of mutual conflict Australia’s arid Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands—as and antagonism, in which each element resists and suppresses the others.3 dynamically-evolving, contemporary cultural production, alongside other cultural traditions. All good stuff, and with some enticing cultural and discursive dimensions, In contrast to these titles, NGVT1 eschewed an overarching rubric in favour but so all-encompassing that the title risks being reduced to a marketing of a series of thematic clusters—Movement, Change, Virtual, Body, Time— rubric, rather than illuminating viewers. But perhaps that is the art of biennial which provided a loose discursive framework within which to consider works naming—keeping it vague but inspirational. ABAA Curator Erica Green was a and groups of works. In an earlier review I noted that these clusters were more little more pointed in her choice of Divided Worlds, and her elegant catalogue apparent in the exhibition publication than in its physical staging, and that introduction threads ideas of difference and diversity within an overarching the NGVT curatorium emphasised that these ideas emerged gradually from narrative of art’s ability to heal and bring together, to offer us: research and development, and were never a premeditated curatorial scheme.6 In reality, and despite their titles, all these exhibitions, and I suggest most …a rewarding encounter with something visionary and an opportunity biennials nowadays, tend to de-emphasise what Erica Green calls ‘curatorial to experience ‘difference’ as a positive strength, an expression of natural coercion’7 in favour of what might be termed ‘artist-led’ exhibition practice. order.4 I will return to various manifestations of this international tendency below.

76 eyeline 90 A corollary of the expectations which develop around curatorial themes counter-productive. One manifestation of the problem is a situation where and statements is the issue of scale. I mean this both in terms of the scope certain artists are given immense resources to realise works at large scale, and size of the biennial itself, and of individual installations. Much has been while others are reduced to a single work. An (admittedly aberrational) written on the ever-expanding sprawl of international biennials and their example of this at NGVT1 was the inclusion of Australian artist Ben Quilty’s increasingly elaborate public and educational programs, and in an earlier single painting of an orange lifejacket, hung in an awkward corridor space. article about 14 (2017)8 I cited American writer Andrew Stefan It struck me that this work was included merely to round out a theme, and Weiner’s remarks about its ‘epoch-defining ambition’, and his suggestion that its siting was ultimately disrespectful to the artist’s large body of work on if Documenta is ‘too big to fail’, it may also have become ‘too big to succeed’.9 these issues. Either (I thought at the time) give Quilty a proper space where Something of a counter-movement to this tendency appears to be underway a series of works could converse and build a narrative, or dispense with such worldwide, however in general these events continue to emphasise scale, a tokenistic inclusion altogether. Some might go further and suggest that exemplified by press releases which trumpet XX artists from XX countries depictions or inclusions of orange lifejackets should themselves be excluded across XX venues. This is quite understandably seen as a significant lure for from serious art exhibitions as facile, disembodied expressions of otherness, audiences, however, arguably, there is a point where the sprawl becomes but that is another conversation.

clockwise from top: Samson Young, Muted Situations 22 Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th, 2018. Photograph Zan Wimberley; Khaled Sabsabi, Bring the Silence, 2018. Photograph silversalt photography; Yasmin Smith, Drowned River Valley, 2016–18. Ceramic installation: Barangaroo sandstone clay salt harvesting vessels, Sydney Harbour salt glaze, steel; midfire slip branches, Parramatta River mangrove wood-ash glaze; midfire slip sleepers, Cockatoo Island turpentine wood-ash glaze, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with assistance from Neil and Karina Hobbs; and Merran Morrison; and the Australia Council for the Arts. Installation view of the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018) at Cockatoo Island. Photograph Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney.

eyeline 90 77 This inevitably leads to a discussion of the grandmaster of refugee-themed was also a viewing platform from which viewers could see the installation art, Ai Weiwei, and his monumental work Law of the Journey installed from above. I found this work to have a very significant ‘presence’ beyond at Sydney’s Cockatoo Island for BoS21. This work, which has seen several its sheer size. It is one of the few works (William Forsythe’s Nowhere and prior iterations over several years, consists of a sixty metre-long, inflatable everywhere at the same time at BoS20 in 2016 was another) which, over many black rubber life raft, in which three hundred inflated black rubber figures years of visiting Cockatoo Island, in my view succeeded in competing with the are huddled, their heads circular and featureless, somewhat like oversized, intensely visual and layered industrial textures of this beguiling site. Indeed, slightly sinister Michelin-men. The scale of this work was such that the the setting seemed to enhance the meaning of this sombre, monochrome figures were easily twice life-size, and at ground level one was almost work—a contemporary Raft of the Medusa marooned in a landscape of urban cowed, looking up at it, the whole pneumatic edifice mounted on a raised decay. Also included in the BoS program was a screening of Ai’s feature-length wooden plinth on which quotations from famous thinkers were placed, each documentary Human Flow (2017), preceded by a Q&A with Mami Kataoka meditating on themes of human migration, freedom and human rights. There at the Sydney Opera House. This event attracted a full house of Sydney and

clockwise from top left: Daniel Boyd, Kudjla/Gangalu peoples, far north Queensland, Expanding Silhouette, 2017. Installation view, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, AGSA. HD video, 16 minutes 9 seconds. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Photograph Paul Steed; Angelica Mesiti, Mother Tongue, 2017. Installation view, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide. Two-channel HD colour video and surround sound, 17 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. Commissioned by Aarhus European Capital of Culture 2017 in association with the 2018 Adelaide Biennial. Photograph Paul Steed; Patrick Pound, The Point of Everything, 2017. Installation view, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, AGSA. Archival materials, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Station Gallery, Melbourne, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington, and Melanie Roger Gallery, Auckland. Photograph Paul Steed; Roy Ananda, Composition for three kit models, 2016. Installation view, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, AGSA. Kit model components, balsa, pins, acrylic paint, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Photograph Paul Steed; Lindy Lee, The Life of Stars, 2015. Stainless steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and UAP. Photograph Charlie Xia.

78 eyeline 90 clockwise from top left: Amos Gebhardt, Lovers, 2018. Installation view, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide. 2 channel video, sound, 12 minutes. Photograph Paul Steed; Barbara Cleveland, Bodies in Time, 2016. Still. Single-channel HD video, 13 mins 46 secs. Photograph Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artists; Emily Floyd, Icelandic Puffins, 2017. Installation view, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide. Wood, two-part epoxy paint, mild steel with black oxide coating, dimensions variable. Photograph Paul Steed. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.

international art cognoscenti, and Ai seemed amused, or perhaps bemused, the artists from the plantation. A portrait by Baloji (2017) was featured at the to be on stage before this expensively-fragranced and coiffed cohort, and in AGNSW. Also of note here was another video projection—Hong-Kong based fact gently ribbed Kataoka throughout an uncomfortable hour for putting Samson Young’s Muted Situation #22: Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th (2018). Young him through it. The film itself I found to be beautifully shot and edited—a has said of his ongoing Muted Situations series: profoundly moving but depressing meditation on human suffering, hope and resilience. However, like Law of the Journey, the film has been dismissed in …muting is not the same as doing nothing. Rather, the act of muting is some quarters as opportunistic and self-promotional. Andrew Weiner has an intensely focused re-imagination and re-construction of the auditory. somewhat witheringly described Ai’s work as ‘high-budget, low-concept It involves the conscious suppression of dominant voices, as a way to emergency Pop’.10 I personally have no doubt that Ai is sincere and committed, uncover the unheard and the marginalised, or to make apparent certain and it is possible that his work actually does some much-needed awareness- assumptions about hearing and sounding.11 raising, however I dwell on it because it illustrates the dangers, for biennial curators, of investing heavily in major works by a few marquee names. This Rather than continue to list standout works at BoS (of which there were conundrum is nicely encapsulated in an overheard phone conversation to many more at other venues), I want to continue my comparative approach, and the effect that ‘I’m on a ferry to Cockatoo Island to Instagram [now a verb, turn to the much smaller and geographically-concentrated Adelaide Biennial of apparently] the Ai Weiwei thing’. There were of course many other significant Australian Art 2018. At AGSA one ‘big-ticket’ equivalent of the larger Sydney works here, and a standout for this author was Japanese artist Yukinori installations discussed above was South Australian Roy Ananda’s immersive Yanagi’s Icarus Container (2018), consisting of a disorientating maze of linked sculptural installation Thin walls between dimensions (2018) which occupied a shipping containers in which a series of mirrors and video projections featured large, darkened space at the foot of the stairs to the lower level, where the main text from Yukio Mishima’s poem, ‘ICARUS’. Also of note was British artist part of the biennial was situated. This atmospherically-lit, grey-toned work, Ryan Gander’s silent, snow-covered (actually polystyrene-covered) tableau and the complex architectural latticework of its spatial occupation, immediately of childhood memory Other Places (2018); Australian artist Yasmin Smith’s had for me techno-militaristic connotations, and I was surprised to read that evocative two-part installation Drowned River Valley (2018); and Australian in fact referenced ‘the iconic role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons’.12 Not Khaled Sabsabi’s atmospheric, five-channel audio visual installationBring the having played this game, perhaps I missed its deeper resonances, but the Silence (2018). Several other standouts must be mentioned in passing. One discursive and even interactive/kinetic promise of the work was dissipated was the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) with in the realisation that it was ‘merely’ an elaborate sculpture, predicated on Baloji and Renzo Martens, whose mesmerising large-screen video CATPC – (admittedly enticing) formal attributes rather than narrative potentiality. I

eyeline 90 79 clockwise from left: Freda Brady, Sandra Ken, Tjungkara Ken, Paniny Mick, Maringka Tunkin, Yaritji Young, Pitjantjatjara people, South Australia, Kangkura-KangkuraKu Tjukurpa – A Sister’s Story, 2017. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 3 panels each 300 x 200cm. Courtesy the artists and Tjala Arts 2017; Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy, We Hunt Mammoth, 2015. Installation view, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, AGSA. Photograph Paul Steed; Timothy Horn, Gorgonia 12 (Strange Love), 2016. Installation view, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, AGSA. Photograph Paul Steed. Courtesy the artist and PPOW Gallery, New York.

could marvel at its ingenious facture and spatial tensions, but it took me no of Stars (2018) which, intricately perforated and illuminated from within, came further. Nearby, a large archivally-inspired installation, The Point of Everything to life each night as darkness fell. As in previous years, the Biennial’s other (2018) by Patrick Pound, seemed to offer greater narrative promise with major venue was a couple of kilometres down North Terrace at the Anne and a fascinating array of disparate artworks and objects drawn from the AGSA Gordon Samstag Museum of Art (known as the Samstag). Not as capacious as collections. The common theme was that all the objects somehow included the AGSA’s roomy basement, this museum, along with a changing array of smaller activity of ‘pointing’ or representations of pointed parts. This ironic ‘Museum venues, is nevertheless important to ABAA’s reach and critical mass within the of Pointing’ was erudite and gently humorous, but it felt to me like a missed city. Here Melbourne artist Emily Floyd’s large sculptural installation Icelandic opportunity. Maybe I need to lighten up. However, I could not help comparing Puffins (2017) had pride of place within the double-height space, Khaled it to Brook Andrew’s similarly archival installation (What’s left behind, 2018) Sabsabi and Vernon Ah Kee showed significant works on the upper levels, and a at the MCA for BoS21, in which he collaborated with artists Rushdi Anwar, highlight for me was Angelica Mesiti’s utterly absorbing Mother Tongue (2017), Shiraz Bayjoo, Mayun Kiki and Vered Snear to mine the collections of Sydney’s a multi-screen projection work with sound (and oh what sound!) filmed across Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, creating a series of crafted vitrines, in a multiple locations in the Danish city of Aarhus, including schools, community multi-layered meditation on cultural memory. halls, migrants’ apartments and wintry outdoor locations. I watched the full Back in Adelaide, there was a lot else to see at AGSA, including Timothy cycle twice and still wanted more. I think it is fair to describe it as choral work, Horn’s seductive, oversized ‘wall bling’; a row of brooding Louise Hearman and much of it—following the performative threads of Mesiti’s earlier videos— portraits; compelling paintings by the APY Lands’ Ken sisters; a projection- shows groups of people singing and making music, however as with all her based installation Expanding Silhouette (2017) by the always-enthralling work it has resonances and depths far beyond its documentary content. Mesiti Daniel Boyd, part of what I think of as his ‘cosmic’ thread; and Claire Healy and will represent Australia at the 2019 La Biennale Arte di Venezia, which is likely Sean Cordeiro’s We Hunt Mammoth (2015) in which ‘the entirety of a Honda to further enhance her already stellar reputation. Two large multi-screen works car has been broken down to 121 individual components, each part tied in jute by Amos Gebhardt, Evanescence (at the AGSA) and Lovers (at Samstag), both and bamboo, a traditional Japanese method of packaging’.13 Outside the front 2018, also impressed. At the nearby Jamfactory Maria Fernanda Cardoso and entrance of the Gallery was Lindy Lee’s elongated stainless steel egg The Life ceramicist Kirsten Coelho showed quietly lovely bodies of work.

80 eyeline 90 So, what more should be said about this fine national survey of Sedgwick have written persuasively about reparative readings (as opposed contemporary practice? It included both well-known and lesser-known to what Sedgwick calls ‘paranoid’ readings)14 and approaches to the art of artists, admirable cultural and gender diversity, works of both scale and of trauma, and I am persuaded that literal depictions of horror merely cause a intimacy across a wide range of mediums. As with NGVT1 there were a couple kind of emotional shut-down in viewers. Arguably Ai’s and Mosse’s works are of rather perfunctory inclusions—for example a single, poorly-situated video calculated to do the opposite—to offer audiences a ‘way in’ to thinking about by the always-interesting collective Barbara Cleveland (formerly Brown the unthinkable. Council)—and a few jarring juxtapositions, but in general artists were well- My focus on these matters is not intended to imply that it is somehow the served by thoughtful installation and production values. Despite these virtues responsibility of biennials, or of contemporary art in general, to engage with this biennale, like the previous one, seemed to occupy familiar, risk-averse troubling and traumatic subjects. The visual arts are no different in this respect ground. It offered many pleasures but few surprises, no sudden jolts of to any other creative endeavour, and the degree to which artists, writers realisation, no discomforting insights, with the possible exception of Mesiti’s and musicians choose to engage with such themes is ultimately a matter for compassionate gaze into Aarhus lives. This may be because I had seen a good their own practice. However, there is certainly an opportunity for biennials many of these works elsewhere, but I think my disquiet goes deeper. If, as to nurture edgier, riskier works and curatorial approaches. Some would Erica Green reminds us, we are living in ‘troubled times’, then to my eye the suggest that in Australia—served as we are by a fine array of contemporary exhibition shied away from the grit and shit and danger of so many precarious art museums and any number of national survey shows—biennials are and desperate lives and presented a pleasingly-aestheticised view of the among the few large-scale sites of experimentation where difficult and even troubles—edifying, uplifting and perhaps even consoling for those who live confronting projects can be attempted, and interesting failures accepted as a in the comfortable half (tenth?) of our divided world. possible result. In the face of a heavily-mediated, spectacle-ised polity and Is this a fair assessment? And is the same true of BoS and NGVT1? I would the cacophonous social media manifestations of contemporary politics, it can say broadly yes, but in different ways and to different degrees. ‘Emergency be argued that, in addition to its consoling and reparative functions, the role Pop’ might be a little harsh, but even works which engaged in a direct way with of contemporary art is to connect-up the diverse lifeworlds and anxieties of troubling issues, such as refugees, did so in ways which distance viewers from its publics, to offer them a way forward—a new way of thinking about the the horrors they evoke. I have written previously about Irish photojournalist/ world. To some degree this is already happening, and each of the three events artist Richard Mosse’s majestic large-screen projection Incoming (2016/17), under discussion here have their forward-looking aspects, however the overall shown at NGVT1. I found this work profoundly affecting, and left the impression is one of caution and fear of failure. building deeply troubled by it, conflicted by my own reaction. Mosse’s use of Worldwide, biennials, like art in general, can be seen as entangled in their thermal imaging cameras renders something akin to a photographic negative own crisis of legitimacy, and I will conclude with some global reflections which, slowed-down and set to a powerful, pulsing soundtrack, removes us which may be relevant to Australia. The 10th Biennale in 2018, titled from the viscerality of death and desperation, to deliver—like Ai Weiwei— We don’t need another hero,15 was directed by South African Gabi Ngcobo, an aesthetically seductive meditation on human flows. These are individual and she selected many artists from beyond the North Atlantic, a large number human lives—each blob of heat among the swarming mass in Berlin’s disused of them women, working broadly within what might nowadays be termed Tempelhof airport, or clambering onto a boat—but there I was, among others, an ‘international’ painterly tradition. While advocating for ‘post-colonial and agape at Mosse’s mastery of spectacle. Thinkers such as Australian academics de-colonising discourses’ she disavowed a responsibility to engage with the Susan Best and Jill Bennet and Americans Susan Sontag and Eve Kosofsky crises of European, and specifically German biennials, saying in an interview,

Vernon Ah Kee, Kuku Yalandji/Yidindji/Gugu Yimithirr/Koko Berrin/Waanji people, Queensland, unwritten (unwashed), 2017. Installation view, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2018. Acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 150 x 180cm. Courtesy the artist an Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

eyeline 90 81 ‘We are not fixing the mess … We are not interested in countering this idea next few years. It appears likely that—following the example of Ngcobo and of biennalisation’.16 German art historian Susanne von Falkenhausen has Pérez-Barreiro—the emphasis on scale, complexity and numbers of artists characterised Ngcobo and her team’s approach as ‘post-identitarian’, avoiding which has been evident in recent years, may give way to an in-depth focus what she calls ‘externally identified, and thereby exoticised, others presented on fewer artists. Australian biennials have immense potential to generate as stand-ins for Western guilt’.17 Ngcobo’s confident, post-colonial and post- new forms and methodologies, and the regional focus of the APT has, over identitarian approach seems to offer a way forward for biennials riven with successive iterations, carved out a unique reputation. The NGVT, with its anxiety about their own relevance, by giving primacy to the cultural agency multi-disciplinary emphasis and generation of a kind of social commons of artists, and to artist-led practice. through myriad activities and audience engagement strategies, shows signs This renewed emphasis on artistic agency is also evident in the 33rd of doing the same. It will be interesting to see whether Adelaide and Sydney Bienal de São Paulo (2018), directed by Spanish-born chief curator Gabriel are also able to invigorate what has come to be perceived as a somewhat tired Pérez-Barreiro. He advocates a different model to what he calls the ‘standard format.  protocol’ of the ‘centralised, discursive, and top-down biennial’ in favour of a ‘more diversified experience, in which the hierarchy between art and Notes curatorial practice can be re-thought’.18 To this end he has eschewed the 1. The term ‘biennials’ in this article is used generically to include triennials, trend towards large teams of professional curators selecting hundreds of quinquennials such as Germany’s Documenta, and other recurrent exhibition artists from scores of countries, and instead invited seven artists to curate a formats. series of standalone exhibitions, which include their own work. In addition, 2. The world’s top museum attendance in 2017 was at the Fondation Louis Vuitton he selected twelve individual artists’ projects which he considers ‘to be in Paris, for the exhibition Icons of Modern Art – The Shchukin Collection (total remarkable for different reasons, and who do not necessarily have a thematic 1,205,063; daily 8,926), and the top daily attendance was 11,268 (total 600,439) at connection between them’.19 Of these twelve, Pérez-Barreiro says, ‘three are Japan’s Tokyo National Museum for Unkei – the Great Master of Buddhist Sculpture. posthumous exhibitions of key artists of the 1990s who have not received the Both of these were ticketed exhibitions. The (ticketed) attracted a attention they deserve in recent art history’.20 While this approach may not be total of 615,000 across its multiple venues, and Documenta (free) a total of 1,230,500 unprecedented, it is rare to encounter it in the era of the curator-auteur, the across over more than 46 venues in Kassel (891,500) and Athens (339,000). See more so because, while all these artists are well respected, they are certainly ‘Visitor figures 2017’, The Art Newspaper, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/visitor- not household names. The curatorial approach to this biennial strikes me as a figures-2017; and Andrew Russeth, ‘Documenta 14 Reports Record Attendance’, shining exemplar of what I mean by the term ‘artist-led’ exhibition practice. It ArtNews, 19 September 2017, http://www.artnews.com/2017/09/19/documenta-14- remains to be seen how these trends will affect Australian biennials over the reports-record-attendance/

clockwise from top left: Richard Mosse, Incoming, 2015–16. Still. Three channel high definition video, surround sound, 52 min 10 sec (looped). Cinematographer / Editor: Trevor Tweeten. Composer / Sound Designer: Ben Frost. Co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Barbican Art Gallery, London. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased with the assistance of the 2016 NGV Curatorial Tour donors, 2017; Richard Mosse, Incoming, 2015–16. Still; Richard Mosse, Hellinikon Olympic Arena, 2016. Digital type C print on metallic paper, 127.0 x 265.4 cm (framed). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased with the assistance of the 2016 NGV Curatorial Tour donors, 2017; Richard Mosse, Incoming, 2015–16. Still. Images © Richard Mosse. Images courtesy Richard Mosse, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and carlier|gebauer, Berlin.

82 eyeline 90 Ben Quilty, High tide mark, 2016. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The John McCaughey Memorial Prize Trust, 2016. © Courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.

3. 21st Biennale of Sydney, online curatorial statement notes, https://www. 15. 10th Berlin Biennale – We don’t need another hero, curated by Gabi Ngcobo with biennaleofsydney.art/#statement Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Serubiri Moses, Yvette Mutumba and Thiago de Paula 4. Erica Green, ‘Divided Worlds’, 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, p.21. Souza, various venues, Berlin, Germany, 9 June – 9 September 2018. 5. Green, ibid., p.20. 16. Kate Brown, ‘“We’re Not Fixing the Mess”: The Curator of the 10th Berlin 6. David Corbet, ‘NGV Triennial’, Eyeline, No.89, 2018, pp.78-79. Biennale, Gabi Ngcobo, Refuses to Exorcize Europe’s Colonial Ghosts’, Artnet News, 7. Green, op. cit., p.20. 7 June 2018, https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/berlin-biennale-10-2018-1298021 8. David Corbet, ‘Unlearning from Europe – Notes on Documenta 14’, Eyeline, 17. Susanne Von Falkenhausen, ‘Biennials at an Impasse’, Frieze, No.197, August, No.88, 2018, pp.30-38. 2018. 9. Andrew Stefan Weiner, ‘The Art of the Possible: With and against Documenta 18. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, ‘Affective Affinities – Curatorial Presentation’, news 14’, Biennial Foundation Magazine, 14 August 2017. http://www.biennialfoundation. release, 2018. org/2017/08/art-possible-documenta-14/ 19. The twelve individual artist projects were by living artists Alejandro Corujeira, 10. Weiner, ibid. Bruno Moreschi, Luiza Crosman, Maria Laet, Nelson Felix, Siron Franco, Tamar 11. 21st Biennale of Sydney, online artist notes, https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/ Guimarães, Vânia Mignone; and featured deceased artists Lucia Nogueira, Aníbal artists/samson-young/ López and Feliciano Centurión. 12. Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2018, online artist notes, http:// 20. Pérez-Barreiro, op. cit. adelaidebiennial.com.au/2018/artist/roy-ananda/ 13. Ibid, http://adelaidebiennial.com.au/2018/artist/cordeirohealy/ 14. See: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, David Corbet is an independent writer, curator and educator. You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Duke University Press, Durham; London, 2003, p.139. See also: Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Hamish Hamilton, London, 2003; Susan Best, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography, Bloomsbury, London, 2016; Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, Cultural Memory in the Present series, Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2005.

eyeline 90 83