Framing a New World Order

Abstract

17th Biennale of Sydney Sydney, Australia May 12-August 1, 2010 Riding the ferry home from Cockatoo Island invites reflection. Cockatoo is the biggest island in Sydney Harbour and among seven venues showing work in the 17th Biennale of Sydney. A former convict prison and defunct shipyard, the site provokes consideration of a key concern in Artistic Director David Elliot's take on the 17th Biennale of Sydney, namely how the colonizing impulse has been, by turn, internalized and resisted in cultures around the world. After sitting in its many darkened chambers lit by the flicker of film, one gains a sense of the powerful mediating role of video in negotiating personal and national identities in a postcolonial world. This year's biennale draws inspiration from the multidisciplinary achievements of American musicologist and filmmaker Harry Smith and champions a non-hierarchical arrangement of works where no culture can claim precedence over another. event brings together a broad 440 works spanning painting, sculpture, photography, installation, sound art, performance, and more under the theme The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age. A comprehensive program of video works is among the biennale's most striking features and warrants closer consideration. As the biennale makes use of multiple non-gallery venues, some spectacular artworks, including large-scale videos, appear strategically employed to capture the attention of visitors while simultaneously challenging audiences with conceptual complexity. This is true of one of its star attractions, Isaac Julien's epic nine-channel video installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010), which debuted at the biennale. An unashamedly beautiful work, it represents a significant step forward in the artist's vision, boldly connecting video with the fragmentary nature of modern subjectivity by challenging the viewer to hold multiple images and stories in their mind simultaneously. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Beginning with shots of a turbulent, churning sea at night, the scene is overlaid with the soundtrack of desperate rescuers searching for a group of Chinese migrants whose boat has overturned off the coast of Lancashire, England. From here, the focus shifts to China, enacting a lush, cinematic journey through rural countryside and cosmopolitan interiors spliced with enigmatic sequences played out on a nostalgic Shanghai film set. In abstract ways, the video tracks the magnetic pull of the promise of a better life that drives migration as well as the complex desires shaping the modernization of today's China. Yet, other artists diverge markedly form the cinematic. German artist Christian Jankowski collaborates with television personalities and artworld celebrities to produce a mock documentary on his own practice in Live from the Inside (2010), playfully interrogating where power in media representations is actually vested. …