The future is already here

The title of the 20th Biennale of Sydney (18.3–5.6.2016) “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”, is quoted from science-fiction author William Gibson, implying that past visions of the future have been surpassed by technological change so rapid that we can no longer imagine anything that isn’t already happening.

The capacity to manifest a future is stronger for some than others, as the pace of change is underwritten by social structures of inequality and difference. Access to this advanced technocratic civilisation is constantly contested, whether in our city suburbs or on the supposedly inviolable borders of nations.

With a three-channel video installation Open Phone Booth, Nilbar Güreş raises the issue of how globalising processes are consolidating an uneven distribution of technology and infrastructure. She highlights the case of a small village that is contested by Kurdistan and the Republic of Turkey resulting in a lack of development and infrastructure. In this work, the phone booth presents the viewer various scenarios through which to witness the lives of village inhabitants, as they struggle to connect with family and others. It gives an insight into the isolating affects of conflict and a lack of connective infrastructure, highlighting how far people will go to overcome these limits.  

With the complicated framework of the 20th Biennale of Sydney, the curator Stephanie Rosenthal has mapped out a structure onto the timetable of works, calling the varying venues different embassies, such as “the embassy of the real” looking at technology, “the embassy of disappearance”, “the embassy of spirits” and so on. However the themes that are most prominent go beyond the occasionally random categorisation of the embassies into ideas about technology and presence, duration, and safety.

In the centre of Sydney Harbour, reached by ferry ride from the business centre, Cockatoo Island, a convict settlement and shipyard finally converted into a space for artists to explore the nature of reality and technological change. Here artist Camile Henrot showed Grosse Fatigue, a video of disparate mythologies based on research at the Smithsonian Institution in the US. Like a scientist she organises the creation myths of Christian, Buddhist, Kabbalah, Navajo and Inuit belief systems into a kind of literary comparative table, aligning them all in a single structure where they connected to each other to form a poem. The work mashes together scenes, images and ideas in a mode that is now classic of internet culture, juxtaposing museum objects with random internet research and everyday scenes from the artists life, trying to build relationships between them. Grosse Fatigue is of course the result of trying to endlessly connect this incessant information, like an analyst with a dataset that never runs dry.

Lee Bul’s futuristic site-specific installation Willing to be Vulnerable invited the viewer to enter a fantastic space. Comprising a combination of materials connected together in an ad hoc and quotidian way, as well as a series of volitant forms, the biennale guide describes it as reminiscent of the Hindenburg airship, the largest flying object ever made, a modernist innovation that ended in disaster. With this Lee Bul reveals the appeal of utopia, our quest for the unattainable, fuelled by intense desire. She asks, even if the outcome is failure, does that make our attempt to approach an ideal any less spectacular? At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a collaboration between Indigenous artist Ken Thaiday Snr and Jason Christopher has used dance machine to construct a motorised hammerhead shark sculpture, with a menacing sound and shadow play. In this work, technology shows both the presence and absence of tradition, using Thaiday’s handmade works as a template from which the form and jerky dancing movement of the work is modelled but also giving the work an automatic movement based on 3D CAD which appears independent of its creators.

One feature of the biennale format that a few works have successfully worked with is its duration. Several works directly respond to their site and how it changes over time, visualising this process and integrating it into their concept. At Carriageworks, Neha Choksi’s The Sun’s Rehearsal was a site-specific billboard-sized installation at Carriageworks that has been constructed from scaffolding and a wall layers with eight photographs of sunsets, and a digitally rendered depiction of a setting sun. Over the course of the exhibition, the sunsets were peeled away from the wall, the remaining photographic scraps suggesting the passing of time. Over the course of the biennale, Australian dance artist and choreographer Alice Cummins performed In Memory of the Last Sunset, a collaboration developed with Choksi that prompts questions about the life of a continuously warming planet and of an ageing body, speaking to humanity’s last sunset as the world heats up inexorably.

At the heart of the Embassy of Spirits was a quiet room; a space designed for meditation and contemplation. Taro Shinoda’s work Abstraction of Confusion was based on his process of research in the Yirrkala community in Arhnem land. Shinoda created a full-size installation a kind of hall with a small platform for sitting or standing. The walls and floors are completely covered in a layer of ochre and then again in white clay, materials Indigenous people use for their paintings. Viewers on the platform could first watch the clay dry, turning from wettish brown to white, then over the course of weeks, the clay see the clay split, revealing the original layer of ochre. For Shinoda the use of duration in this work was a way for the audience to recognise that nothing will remain in one state forever, that their desire for permanent will never result in permanence.

In another take on duration Yin-Ju Chen’s Liquidation Maps, 2014/2016 were intricate, charts which map the specific astrological permutations that correspond to five violent past events, such as the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975, and the massacres in East Timor of 1999. For Chen, these astrological interactions reveal a consciousness of the universe that governs human action. This fatalistic work asks whether we are involved in events beyond our own volition, cyclical time that binds humanity to inescapable universal trajectories.

The “embassies” were pitched as secure and safe spaces throughout Sydney, places to “think”. Within the walls of the Embassy of Spirits there was a dimly lit space flanked by tall wooden poles, stripped of branches, leaves and bark, yet heavily adorned with detailed pattern and texture. Born in Yirrkala in Northeast Arnhem Land, artist Nyapanyapa Yunupingu created a forest that exists in her memory, a spiritual place of great personal significance, reflecting on a near-fatal encounter with a water buffalo in the 1970s. At this time she began to paint a series of artworks that were referred to as “mayilimiriw”, or “meaningless”. The work gave people the chance to reflect not on the violent incident that almost resulted in her death, but in the feeling of calm hope as she was carried through the eucalyptus trees to the safety of her family.

The greatest potential of biennials is in their plasticity and responsiveness. The biennale gives a framework that is flexible, and capable of continual transformation. Whether by being site-specific, or working with duration, the artworks involved pin down international trends, moods and discourses, and make them meaningful to the time and place in which they take part.

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20th Biennale of Sydney
The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed

On the Biennale of Sydney read also Art in between spaces