Endless Circulation
TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Biennials and magazines both take the form of an edition. They are continuous, one edition after another, but punctuated by pauses. As well as being additive or iterative, biennials and magazines produce contrasting modes of circulation. Where biennials typically bring artists and artworks from all around the world to one place for a designated period of time (a centripetal movement), magazines disperse—they (ideally) move away from their site of origin through postal systems, emails and downloads (a centrifugal movement).
The TarraWarra Biennial was inaugurated in 2006 as a platform for identifying new trends in contemporary Australian art through an experimental curatorial platform. The 2016 Biennial is a collaboration between TarraWarra Museum of Art and the Melbourne-based contemporary art journal, Discipline. Evolving from the structuring principles of the biennial and the serial publication format, the exhibition addresses forms of continuity and circulation, pauses and punctuations. It is alternately shaped by serial and cyclic rhythms—of production and exposure, hosts and dispersals, concentration and diffusion…read more
TarraWarra Biennial pushes boundaries to present to a new audience: Kylie Northover. The Age Entertainment.
With artworks in the bathroom, others hidden from public view, performance art and even an exhibition within the exhibition – that’s essentially an artwork – the 2016 TarraWarra Biennial promises an eclectic survey of contemporary Australian art.
Co-curated by TarraWarra director Victoria Lynn and co-founder of Discipline art journal, Helen Hughes, Biennial 2016 will feature more than 30 artists across multiple disciplines. Inaugurated in 2006 as a platform for identifying new contemporary and cutting-edge work, each Biennial has a central theme; this year’s, Endless Circulation, emerged from the concept of the similarities between a biennial and a publication.
“They both take the form of an edition; the biennial happens every two years and has a different curator, our journal comes out once a year or every two years, so there’s a sense of continuity even though each edition is quite different in tone,” says Hughes, adding that exhibitions and publications are both invested in making something public for the first time…read more
5th TarraWarra Biennial: Sophie Knezic. Frieze Dot Com.
Robert Andrew makes colours metaphoric in Transitional Text – BURU (2016). Three panels covered in white chalk have their powdery surfaces attacked by an electromechanically operated water gun formed from the components of a 3D printer. As the water abrades the chalk, a layer of red ochre is exposed. Over time, the purged areas spell the word Buru – the Yawuru word for ‘country’. (The ochre is sourced from Yawuru in Western Australia, where the artist’s forebears hail from.) The paint recalls bullet holes and the water trickling down the surface indents the chalk revealing a line of blood-red ochre: it’s unmistakably a response to the history of Aboriginal genocide. Material transformations are also evident in Julia McInerney’s the light, and the Light – Virginia Woolf Piece II (two anchors melted down and recast) (2014): two shallow baths filled with salt water installed on the museum’s floor. Akin to Andrew’s work, the whiteness of the salt water variously suggests whitewashing or muteness, a blankness masking suppressed histories…read more