The Biennale of Reconciliation - art exhibition in Sydney, Australia

This year's Sydney Biennale mixed international contemporary art with work by the agency of Australian and Aboriginal artists, thus reinforcing the latter's legitimate place within the larger art world.

upon Dec. 31, 1999, people the world above first witnessed the dawning of the of recent origin millennium with televised images of the fireworks display upon the Sydney Harbor Bridge. This trice in the international spotlight was repeated nine month later when organ of sights from around the globe one time again turned to Sydney for the two-week period of the Summer Olympic Games. In anticipation of the games, the travel industry did its part to increase awareness of Australia in general and Sydney in particular.

Other sponsors organized the Biennale of Sydney 2000 to take advantage of the city's novel visibility on the world stage. A lively, upbeat and engaging display which, in a typically Australian manner, struck no attitude s ("no worries, mate, no dramas"), it was also highly intelligent and ofttimes tightly curated, with a lusty didactic edge. The exhibition made statements about the nature and range of international contemporary art at a historic second and about the (rightful) place of contemporary Australian and Aboriginal artists within that art world. At the same time, it demonstrated that the gap between contemporary Australian and Aboriginal art has begun to shut up that a kind of reconciliation has taken place in the visual arts at a time when reconciliation with indigenous familys is among the most pressing political, social and moral issues in Australian life.

For the next to the first time in its 27-year history, the Sydney Biennale was organized not by dint of a single curator but by the agency of an international team. It consisted of six leading professionals, greatest in quantity of them veterans of previous biennials: Fumio Nanjo, an independent curator from Tokyo who organized the Taipei Biennale in 1998; Louise Neri, a fresh York-based, Australian-bom independent curator and former senior editor of Parkett magazine, who cocurated the 1997 Whitney Biennial; Hetti Perkins, curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the Art Gallery of novel South Wales, Sydney; Nicolas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, London; Robert Storr, senior curator of painting and statuary at the Museum of fresh Art, New York; and Zurich-based Harold Szeemann, director of the 1999 Venice Biennale, curator for Lyon in 1997 and part of a team that curated the 1997 Kwangju Bieunale in Korea. The whole was coordinated by the agency of the English-born Nick Waterlow, a Sydney resident since 1977 and artistic director of the 1979 1986 and 1988 Sydney biennials; for the past nine years he has been director of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery of the University of of recent origin South Wales. Since its inception in 1973 the Sydney Bieunale has been primarily supported by the agency of Transfield, a largely family-owned, Sydney-based construction company (recently responsible for tunneling beneath Sydney Harbor). The head of the family, Franco Belgiomo-Nettis, conceived the idea of a Sydney biennial, based upon the model of the single held in Venice in his land of origin.

It was therefore appropriate that the curatorial team for this year's biennial met in Venice in June 1999 as Szeemann's exhibit opened there. The future exhibition's working title was "Agents of Change," the idea being to identify a small, multigenerational clump of artists whose work could be seen as pivotal in the last hardly any decades of the 20th hundred But because a number of the younger artists pick outed for the show had emerg single recently, making the nature and expansion of their influence uncertain, that title was abandoned.

The curators decided to near early and later works by dint of many artists to give a broader picture of their careers. (This was not the case, however, with greatest in quantity of those malting large-scale installations or working in film and video). The mini-retrospective approach was important for the local audience, as a range of work by means of most international artists is not readily available in Australia; and it was an effective means by dint of which to introduce Australian work to international visitors.

For the greatest in quantity part, each artist's work appeared in its have a title to gallery, giving the exhibition a measured, ordered, level elegant feel, particularly when compared with exhibitions (among them previous Sydney biennials) in which numerous artists' works cope for attention within a single space. The installation was deliberative with many insightful pairings and groupings made with regard to the one and the other linkages and contrasts of form and intention. The exhibition focused upon 49 artists, from 23 countries, who work in painting, statuary photography, film, video, installation and performance. It included older established artists, among them Bruce Nauman, Louise Bourgeois, Gerhard Richter, Ilya Kabakov, Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama. A scarcely any of the artists--Germans Dieter Roth and Martin Kippenberger and Australians Rosalie Gascoigne and Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri--were not long ago deceased. Many of the younger participants were so-called festival regulars, among them Stan Douglas, Pipilotti Rist, Vanessa Beecroft, Doug Aitken, Mariko Mori, Shirin Neshat, Cai Guo-Qiang and Xu Bing. A number of works by the agency of these and other artists had been featured in previous international present to views including earlier Sydney biennials, more [i]or[/i] less of them more than once(1) and work by the agency of several had been shown in Sydney museums in the preceding year.(2) As a whole, the biennial, which might be characterized as a conservative exhibition, was distinguished through the high quality of the work upon view.