South by southeast: the 14th Sydney Biennale avoided many of the excesses typical of international art festivals by showing fewer artists and newer, often specially commissioned works

Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Lilly Wei

Art Gallery of New South Wales

The Art Gallery of New South Wales, which holds the largest collection of aboriginal art in Australia, housed works by 16 artists (Helena Almeida, Pat Brassington, Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij, Carolyn Eskdale, Mattias Faldbakken, Asta Groting, Emiko Kasahara, Daniel Malone, Thomas Mulcaire and Amanda R. Alves, MP and MP Rosado, Frank Thiel, Daniel von Sturmer and Yin Xiuzhen).

Hung at the entrance to the galleries for temporary exhibitions, Beijing artist Yin Xiuzhen's eye-catching soft sculpture, International Flight (2001-04), consisted of two airplanes, each approximately 16 feet long. Their armatures were made of aluminum and covered with a patchwork of used clothes collected during the artist's travels; the planes were suspended over a heap of clothing collected from Sydneysiders. Nearby was an installation of a half-dozen of Yin's Portable Cities (2002-04), a series of suitcases that open to reveal miniaturized, cunningly sewn skylines and monuments of Paris, Sydney and Lisbon, among other places. Again fabricated from cast-offs gathered from the inhabitants of the cities depicted, these works came complete with a CD map and sound, each "city" a mostly handmade riff on specific lives and histories. The clothes represented the people who once wore them; the suitcases and airplanes were emblems of relocation and displacement.

Platinum blond wigs stretched out flat into perfect circles and floated on the floor like heavenly lotus pads, accompanied by a number of slick, bubblegum-pink photographs of the cervix--talk about body art--were New York-based Emiko Kasahara's contribution. At the other end of the gallery Frank Thiel (Berlin) showed a series of large, richly colored, luminous photographs of urban sites that read as abstract paintings. The esthetic is a variant, say, of that underlying Andreas Gursky's sprawling panoramas, only more intimate and sensuous.

Daniel Malone (Auckland) was accorded a long corridor on whose walls he painted a lurid Technicolor landscape that merged New Zealand hills with Australian desert, a scene based on a film by Tracy Moffatt, one of Australia's most internationally visible artists. A Long Drop to Nationhood (2004), as this work was titled, terminated in an outhouse imported from New Zealand. Malone designated this artifact as the essential common denominator of two closely linked cultures, and he equipped it with a video inside that showed him washing down and fumigating the structure in order to clear Australian customs.

Project for Sydney (2004), by Thomas Mulcaire and Amanda Rodrigues Alves (Cape Town/Sao Paulo), consisted of wall text that read "Sorry" and "No Worries" and stacks of large posters printed with the same words to be handed out to viewers. Unfortunately, these seemed too reminiscent of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's giveaways.

Helena Almeida (Lisbon), whom Carlos has long supported, and who was one of the first artists she thought of when organizing the biennial, was represented by three series of black-and-white photographs of herself, from 2003, 1994 and 1977, ranging in size from over 7 feet to less than 2. Two of the series incorporate an acrylic paint element as well. In the earliest sequence--six images, all taken in her studio--the artist's hand holding a brush is shown painting a spot of blue paint onto an invisible surface. In progression, her hand picks up the painted spot, brings it to her mouth, her face appearing in profile along the edge of the photo, inserts it and presumably swallows it; the series ends with Almeida still in profile, lips tightly closed. Her other self-representations are larger, just under life-size, and are cut-off, frontal images of her body, the focal point her hand; one picture is splashed with red paint over her outspread palm. The third group depicts the artist on the floor, curled up in strangely contorted shapes, like abstract sculpture, with a glimpse of her hand or foot in some of the frames. Almeida's body is her medium; as she once said, "I am the canvas."