Outside the art scene, it may not be understood that, for the selected Australian artist, the Venice Biennale is an opportunity of Olympian stature.
Fiona Hall’s selection last year was uncontroversial given her significant accomplishments, and it is fitting she was given the opportunity to launch the new purpose-built Australian Pavilion. This year, her Venice installation, Wrong Way Time, is reinstalled at the National Gallery of Australia.
This wunderkammer-like collection of objects, materials and images directs attention to the current environmental, social and political state of the globe.
“The enduring legacy is that Hall looked quite distinctive – not following fashionable trends but rather revealing an artist who is absolutely true to herself – a great ‘maker’ of art works with the ability to convey profound messages,” says NGA senior curator Deborah Hart, who saw Wrong Way Time in Venice.
“She doesn’t tell people what to think but she opens up profound areas of experience for us to contemplate, question and take on board. Her work is provocative but also at times playful and witty, and always engaging.”
”In its major temporary exhibition space the NGA has “exactly mirrored the space of the Australian Pavilion in Venice”, according to Hart. Other works by Hall from the NGA collection, including her Paradise and The Divine Comedy series and her cutout Morality dolls: the seven deadly sins, 1984, will extend the exhibition into other galleries.
“The world is such an amazing place,” Hall says, “yet sadly we are living in troubled times and that sense is reflected in a lot of the works”. Her artistic intensity expresses concern about changes to the earth’s environment, yet in her artwork her concerns become life-affirming and vital.
Wrong Way Time
Fiona Hall
National Gallery of Australia
22 April – 10 July
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
Past meets present in Leyla Steven’s latest exhibition, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-curated by Artspace. The Australian-Balinese artists adopts a collaborative approach to restitution, scrutinising the systems of conservation and documentation we have inherited.
In an expansive show at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, seven leading Australian ceramic artists have reinvigorated one of Australia’s oldest museum collections by creating a contemporary potter’s quarter—known as the ‘kerameikos’ in Ancient Greece.
