19th Biennale of Sydney highlights

#19BOS (CARRIAGEWORKS): Mathias Poledna, A Village by the Sea, 2011.

For the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), Mathias Poledna presented A Village by the Sea (2011) at Carriageworks. In a short black-and-white film, inside a shadow-lit, silver screen dream-set of an uptown Manhattan apartment, a tuxedoed man and a frothily dressed woman perform a duet: a song-and-dance routine familiar to any fan of Hollywood musicals of the 1930s.

Photograph: Mathias Poledna, A Village by the Sea, 2011 (35mm frame enlargement) 35mm film, 5:40 mins, black and white, optical sound. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne and Berlin; Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna; and Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles

#19BOS (ARTSPACE): Henna-Riikka Halonen, Moderate Manipulations, 2012.
Photograph: Sebastian Kriete

#19BOS (ARTSPACE): Maxime Rossi, Père Lachaise, 2010.

For the 19th Biennale of Sydney, Rossi presentsed two works, Père Lachaise (2010) at Artspace and Two Owls on a Mountain, and a Snake at the Bank(2012) on Cockatoo Island.

To create Père Lachaise, over a period of days Rossi placed sheets of Frédéric Chopin’s musical notations near the composer’s tomb in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery. The artist suspended pens filled with coloured ink in a tree that overhangs the site, and as the branches were unsettled by the interventions of movement caused by birds and shifting winds, the ink dripped, forming vivid drops on the sheets of paper below.

Photograph: Ben Symons

#19BOS (CARRIAGEWORKS): Henry Coombes, I am the Architect, This is not Happening, This is Unacceptable, 2012 (production still).

For the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), Henry Coombes presented his work I am the Architect, this is not Happening, this is Unacceptable (2012), which was the result of the artist’s residency at House for an Art Lover, designed in the early twentieth century by Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his artist wife Margaret MacDonald, in Bellahousten Park near Glasgow.

Coombes references the social and historical history of the house and park in this film about a heady dispute between a ‘rational’ architect and the ‘irrational’ realm of art.

#19BOS (AGNSW): Deborah Kelly + collaborators, No Human Being Is Illegal (In All Our Glory), 2014. Photograph: Gunther Hang

#19BOS (CARRIAGEWORKS): Tacita Dean, Event for a Stage, 2014.
Photograph: Zan Wimberley

#19BOS (CARRIAGEWORKS): Tacita Dean, Event for a Stage, 2014.
Photograph: Zan Wimberley

#19BOS (MCA): Pipilotti Rist, Mercy Garden Retour Skin, 2014.

Lush and Edenic, sexy but sinless, the hedonistic pleasure worlds created by Pipilotti Rist delight, revive and relax. Her vivid video environments take the viewer into an elemental dream state: earth, wind, fire and water are all alchemically activated in her mesmerising loops of trippy experience.

A new creation for the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), Mercy Garden Retour Skin (2014) offered audiences an aquarium of experience. The huge walls of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia were splashed with Rist’s dazzling visions, inspired by alpine and village life. Visitors were encouraged to lie and sit, cuddling up to their person cushions; happy companions in this special, hyper-visual universe.

Photograph: James Horan/Destination NSW

#19BOS (MCA): Pipilotti Rist, Mercy Garden Retour Skin, 2014.
Photograph: James Horan/Destination NSW

#19BOS (CARRIAGEWORKS): Daniel McKewen, Running Men, 2008–14.
Photograph: Daniel McKewen

#19BOS (CARRIAGEWORKS): Daniel McKewen, Running Men, 2008–14.
Photograph: Daniel McKewen

#19BOS (CARRIAGEWORKS): Gabriel Lester, Where Spirits Dwell, 2014.

Continuing his exploration of theatrical staging and filmic techniques, for the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) Dutch artist Gabriel Lester created a new, large-scale, site-specific installation, Where Spirits Dwell (2014).

His enchanting piece provides a focal point for a cluster of works exploring film and theatre language within the unique architectural interior of Carriageworks.


Photograph: Gabriel Lester

#19BOS (CARRIAGEWORKS): Anna Tuori, various.

Finnish artist Anna Tuori works primarily in oil paint to create images that captivate the viewer, drawing them into a fictional world of whimsy and imagination.

Presented at Carriageworks, her three new works included in the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) – It’s All Now You See; Nobody Knew My Rose; and Blow Out Your Candles, Laura (II) (all 2013) – are united in their depiction of a barren snowy landscape, with the inclusion of a structure in which to shelter from the cold.

Photograph: Sebastian Kriete

#19BOS (CARRIAGEWORKS): Anna Tuori, Nobody Knew My Rose (2013).
Photograph: Sebastian Kriete