Highlights from the last couple of days' visits:
MCA
Sosa Joseph's Kerala-informed paintings, of which my favourite was "Your Earth, My World" (2018) with its host of whimsical grotesques:
Marjolijn Dijkman's "Navigating Polarities" (2018), video projections in a circular concave screen within a standing bowl, accompanied by audio of statements from a range of sources interpreting the concept of polarities broadly while still meaningfully - e.g. "Binary thinking is rarely symmetrical", "Some people, standing in the fore peak of a craft, or lying in the bottom or bilge, can actually sense the magnetic field of the Earth":
Marc Bauer's hand-painted ceramics and the story they tell in French, "Diary, Madam F.C." (2017):
Nicole Wong's marble-engraved top 10 google results for specific phrases, which I found poignant and amusing and entirely human, e.g. "People say" (2018):
AGNSW
Eija-Liisa Ahtila's "Potentiality for Love - Mahdollinen Rakkaus" (2018) - a quite lovely installation that included a couple of pieces, the centre of which was an LED-screen projection which felt like being immersed in love, floating through blue, blinding white light, final embrace:
Miriam Cahn's smearily bright oils:
Cockatoo Island
This was a lot of fun all round, a great setting for contemporary art, and especially the large industrial precinct which housed the two highlights of the Biennale as a whole for me (at least of those bits that I managed to catch): Yukinori Yanagi's "Icarus Container" (2018), in which you make your way through a dark series of mirrored corridors inside large shipping containers, a fiercely burning sun nearly at the entrance and a blue sky visible in reflection from far away at the end, with passages from Yukio Mishima's poem about Icarus appearing throughout, also reflecting literally/figuratively on the force of nuclear power:
And Ai Weiwei's "Law of the Journey", with its massive raft full of people and accompanying text from, among many others, Kafka, Homer, Socrates, Augustine, Zadie Smith, James Baldwin and Vaclav Havel on immigration, nationhood and humanity, which I was moved by:
There was also Koji Ryui's "Jamais vu" (2018) installation, in which the sound was an important part:
Two others of Yukinori Yanagi's (obviously an artist to look out for), "Absolute Dud" (2016) and "Landscape with an Eye" (2018), the latter of which involves nuclear explosion projections onto the titular, hanging eye:
MCA
Sosa Joseph's Kerala-informed paintings, of which my favourite was "Your Earth, My World" (2018) with its host of whimsical grotesques:
Marc Bauer's hand-painted ceramics and the story they tell in French, "Diary, Madam F.C." (2017):
Nicole Wong's marble-engraved top 10 google results for specific phrases, which I found poignant and amusing and entirely human, e.g. "People say" (2018):
AGNSW
Eija-Liisa Ahtila's "Potentiality for Love - Mahdollinen Rakkaus" (2018) - a quite lovely installation that included a couple of pieces, the centre of which was an LED-screen projection which felt like being immersed in love, floating through blue, blinding white light, final embrace:
Miriam Cahn's smearily bright oils:
Cockatoo Island
This was a lot of fun all round, a great setting for contemporary art, and especially the large industrial precinct which housed the two highlights of the Biennale as a whole for me (at least of those bits that I managed to catch): Yukinori Yanagi's "Icarus Container" (2018), in which you make your way through a dark series of mirrored corridors inside large shipping containers, a fiercely burning sun nearly at the entrance and a blue sky visible in reflection from far away at the end, with passages from Yukio Mishima's poem about Icarus appearing throughout, also reflecting literally/figuratively on the force of nuclear power:
And Ai Weiwei's "Law of the Journey", with its massive raft full of people and accompanying text from, among many others, Kafka, Homer, Socrates, Augustine, Zadie Smith, James Baldwin and Vaclav Havel on immigration, nationhood and humanity, which I was moved by:
There was also Koji Ryui's "Jamais vu" (2018) installation, in which the sound was an important part:
Two others of Yukinori Yanagi's (obviously an artist to look out for), "Absolute Dud" (2016) and "Landscape with an Eye" (2018), the latter of which involves nuclear explosion projections onto the titular, hanging eye:
Dimitar Solakov's "New Life for the Past" series (Bulgaria, 2015 - below, "Pliska"):
