19th Biennale of Sydney: Cockatoo Island highlights

#19BOS (2014): Nathan Coley,YOU CREATE WHAT YOU WILL, 2014. Photograph: Tai Spruyt

#19BOS (2014): Callum Morton, The Other Side , 2014.
Photographer: Sebastian Kriete

#19BOS (2014): Hubert Czerepok, Let’s Change It All, 2014.
Photograph: Gunther Hung

#19BOS (2014): Tori Wrånes, Stone and Singer, 2014.

During the opening weekend, Wrånes presented Stone and Singer (2014), a new performance developed for the 19th Biennale of Sydney.

In the grandeur of the Turbine Shop on Cockatoo Island, the artist faces danger head-on, taking the audience into a pre-modern place, into a world wonderful, dangerous and exhilarating. In this effort she is accompanied by a cast of brass players, and a menagerie of fantastical creatures who emerge from her playful psyche, linked to the folkloric traditions of hero helpers and the banished Jötnar race of Norse mythology.


Photograph: James Horan/Destination NSW

#19BOS (2014): Tori Wrånes, Stone and Singer, 2014.
Photograph: James Horan/Destination NSW

#19BOS (2014): Zilla Leutenegger, Zilla’s House, 2014 (detail).

For #19BOS, Swiss artist Zilla Leutenegger transformed the existing architecture and furnishings of an old residential building on Cockatoo Island for a mixed-media, site-specific installation Zilla's House (2014), a work that combined drawings, sculpture and projections.

Leutenegger animated life back into these once quiet rooms, in her domestic phantasmagoria or shadow play.

Photograph: Tai Spruyt

#19BOS (2014): Matt Hinkley, Untitled, 2013.

For the 19th Biennale of Sydney, Melbourne-based Matt Hinkley presented a new series of sculptural works installed in the Industrial Precinct on Cockatoo Island.

Domestic in scale, the works are dwarfed by the vast and visually noisy space surrounding them, rewarding the intrepid viewer with a sense of discovery. Delicate objects in a rough urban environment, the sculptures represent order amid the chaos, quietly challenging our patience and perception.

Photograph: Tai Spruyt

#19BOS (2014): Yael Bartana, Inferno, 2013 (production still).
Photograph: Sebastian Kriete

#19BOS (2014): Ulla von Brandenburg, Street, Play, Way, 2014.

Ulla von Brandenburg works at the intersection of film, drawing, installation and performance, creating a highly imaginative and poetic body of work that reveals her background and interest in both fine art and theatre design.

For the 19th Biennale of Sydney, von Brandenburg presented a large new mixed-media, site-specific work on Cockatoo Island combining sculptural and filmic elements.

Photograph: Tai Spruyt

#19BOS (2014): Victoria Pihl Lind, A Tone To Play – Abc According to Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, 2013 (video still).

The Austrian and Romanian poets Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan were briefly lovers in Paris after the Second World War, but maintained a correspondence throughout their lives until Celan’s suicide in 1970.

Victoria Pihl Lind’s video work A Tone to Play – Abc According to Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan (2013) takes inspiration from the many letters sent back and forth between the two and the intimate exchanges they shared.

Theirs was both a passionate affair and an intellectual meeting of minds, expressed through words and thoughts across distances and time. Each experienced estrangement from their place of origin and felt pulled between the circumstances and persecutions that characterised the wartime condition.

#19BOS (2014): Kate Daw, Green Lamp, 2013–14.

For the 19th Biennale of Sydney, Melbourne-based artist Kate Daw created a new site-specific installation, Green Lamp (2013–14), on Cockatoo Island.

As the title suggests, Daw has installed a green lamp in the small, open-air building attached to the old military guardhouse on the Upper Island. The light was turned on at dusk as the exhibition closed for the day and continued to shine throughout the night.

Photograph: Tai Spruyt