Tag: International Art
Bangkok Art Biennale 2022
Tuesday, November 15th, 2022 Sydney Morning Herald Column,During the pandemic most of the world’s major art events were put on ice, but this was not the case for the youthful Bangkok Art Biennale. Unwilling to lose momentum after a successful debut in 2018, the organisers hosted a huge international exhibition in 2020 that was seen only by local audiences. This year, the […]
Singapore Biennale 2022
Tuesday, November 8th, 2022 Sydney Morning Herald Column,A town called Alice, a fish named Wanda, a hurricane known as Ian, and now, a Biennale that answers to the name, Natasha. I originally thought this was a unique example of Singaporean humour, but because only one of the four curators of the seventh Biennale of Singapore is a local, that thesis is not […]
Light
Saturday, October 1st, 2022 Sydney Morning Herald Column,After He created heaven and earth, the next item on God’s list was light. “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” Just like flicking a switch. All artists love to play God, and light is their most fundamental concern. Not only is it hard to make art in the dark, light […]
2022 Biennale of Sydney: rīvus
Tuesday, April 26th, 2022 Sydney Morning Herald Column,When he began to plan the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, this year’s director, José Roca, thought of Australia as a hot, dry country in which water was a precious resource. By the time the show got underway, a month ago, Sydney was well into its wettest March on record. Since then, the clouds and rain […]
23rd Sydney Biennale: A Brief Guide
Tuesday, March 15th, 2022 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Preparations for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney were well underway before somebody noticed this year’s theme – rīvus – was an anagram of “virus”. For director, José Roca, who has worked to assemble a vast international show in a locked-down world, it would have been impossible to ignore the pandemic. Roca is from Columbia but […]
2021: The Year in Art
Thursday, January 6th, 2022 Blog,Looking back on 2021 it would require more space to list the exhibitions we didn’t see rather than the ones we did. So many shows were cancelled, cut short or handicapped by the pandemic it’s not hard to remember the highlights. The first notable event of the year was the NGV Triennial, a massive survey […]
Melancholia
Tuesday, September 28th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,When it appeared in 2011, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, was billed as “a beautiful film about the end of the world”. The story was apocalyptic, the narrative slow and moody, reflecting the way sensations are muffled by depression. Tell a depressive the world ends tomorrow, and the reply might be, “Whatever”. Some of Von Trier’s […]
It All Started with a Stale Sandwich
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,This year is the 50th anniversary of the Kaldor Public Art Projects, a testament to the persistence of a Hungarian migrant who needed to share his obsession with an entire city, if not a country. The birthday celebrations will continue to spread the Kaldor gospel via an unorthodox retrospective at the Art Gallery of New […]
NGV Triennial 2020
Tuesday, February 16th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,It’s an old adage that success breeds success but it’s just as true that success breeds complaints. In recent years no Australian art institution has come within coo-ee of the National Gallery of Victoria when it comes to organising spectacular, ambitious exhibitions. These shows have been intended to draw the biggest possible audiences and in […]
The Art of the Spanish Flu
Tuesday, August 4th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Anyone who thinks COVID-19 has claimed a huge number of lives should look at the Spanish flu of 1918-20. In Pale Rider (2017), a compelling history of that earlier pandemic, Laura Spinney writes: “Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918, and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50-100 million, or between […]