BIENNALS:TarraWarra Biennial 2016
Biennials and magazines both take the form of an edition. They are continuous, one edition after another, but punctuated by pauses. As well as being additive or iterative, biennials and magazines produce contrasting modes of circulation. The TarraWarra Biennial was inaugurated in 2006 as a platform for identifying new trends in contemporary Australian art through an experimental curatorial platform.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: TarraWarra Biennial 2016 Archive
The TarraWarra Biennial 2016 is a collaboration between TarraWarra Museum of Art and the Australian contemporary art journal, Discipline. Evolving from the structuring principles of the biennial and the serial publication format, the exhibition “Endless Circulation” addresses forms of continuity and circulation, pauses and punctuations. It is alternately shaped by serial and cyclic rhythmsof production and exposure, hosts and dispersals, concentration and diffusion. The exhibition brings together a range of works that explore continuity by bringing their past and future into the same frame, as well as projects that are predicated on their centrifugal circulation outside the parameters of traditional art spaces. Many works featured in the exhibition use these methods to unveil aspects of Australia’s colonial history and its persistence in the present; others reveal the social, economic and political histories of their own making, or attempt to anticipate their future trajectories—travelling through the marketplace, gradually adapting to new contexts, or degrading over time. Wukun Wanambi presents “Nhina, Nhäma, Ga Ngäma”, a film collage comprising six vertical poles each of which depicts Yolngu ceremonies on country from the ’20s up until today. It is a temporally complex document of one the oldest continuous cultures on earth. Masato Takasaka recycles previous works and objects from his studio, reassembling them to create new works and thereby creating a weird and hermetic circularity between past, present and future. James Tylor utilises 19th Century photographic techniques, such as daguerreotype and tin-type, to image processes of colonisation. His series “DeCookalisation” appropriates images found on the internet that document places in the Moananui a Kiwa region of Australia, that have been named after Captain James Cook. “Terra Botanica” explores the legacy of the English botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who decided which areas of Aotearoa and Australia would be the most suitable for colonisation. The vivid reflective qualities of the metal leave the viewer half-staring at the image, and half-staring at themselves implicating them in the process of surveying that is strongly associated with that of colonization.
Info: Curators: Victoria Lynn and Helen Hughes, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road, Healesville, Duration: 20/8-6/11/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.twma.com.au
