With its underlying history, the works on Cockatoo Island for the 18th Biennale of Sydney (BoS) contain an ambition to connect with the land, the history, and the audience quite differently to those being housed in the museum institutions. The works themselves borrow stories from the origins of the site. Exploring the Island is an adventure that leaves viewers pondering the question, ‘is that art?’
Inspired by a series of sketches for puppet theatre plays created during time spent in a sanatorium by Czech architect Jiri Kroha, Theatre of Speaking Objects – by artist Eva Kot’átková – is just one of the artworks viewers encounter when exploring Cockatoo Island.
Installed across two rooms on the upper level of Building 124, one room is filled with objects, books, collages, and hand-written notes. It induces the curiosity of walking into an artist’s studio, workshop, or writer’s den. The images fascinate – diagrammatic framework transposed over photographs of children, studies of anatomy merged with technical drawing, and passages of illustrated scientific text. A round table in the room’s centre invites viewers to contribute their own hand written stories, themselves becoming apart of the script and activating the performative components of the work.
This room inspires a sense of alternative forms of communication, and an underlying darkness suggests literary narratives of human isolation and oppression of those who do not conform to society’s expectations. Here, objects speak for their owners and become mediators between personal narratives and their interpretations. The theatrical (and therapeutic) method of speaking through someone or something demonstrates a situation when we are not able to personally and freely express our opinion, and other methods are speaking for us.
Actors emerge from the audience, telling stories as if in a therapy session. Simple objects are used as props, which become embedded with the deeper emotions of these stories. Conversations with viewers further deepen the blurred relationships between personal experience and the act of story telling.
This play on objects once again occurs in Robin Rhode’s work Arm Chair. In Building 93, a series of stop-motion animations play out on large screens installed through an empty space. A motif of Gerrit Rietveld’s chair design appears differently in each video, referencing mass production in ways that vary from political – with a play on military power, to playful – using children as actors, and a lively staccato soundtrack. Rhode uses minimal props, transient materials such as chalk and charcoal, and semi-industrial backdrops of brick walls painted with household paint. He conjures movement within motionless objects, turning solid structural spaces into fluid, imaginative occurrences.
The stripped back nature of the building itself is reflected in the videos, and the videos are (by chance?) reflected in puddles of water on the ground. With this connection between the work and the site, we are inclined to consider the space in more depth – what happened here in the past? As Rhode’s chairs are painted then erased, what has happened here that has since been erased? What marks were left?
The works by Robin Rhode and Eva Kot’átková both speak of the way in which Cockatoo Island comes alive during the BoS. Both artists challenge social assumptions, recreating the spaces in which their works are exhibited to be as coherent and communicative as if in the conventional space of a museum of gallery institution. The natural elements and atmosphere of the island allow the artworks to form an alternative and unique mode of communication with the viewer.
18th Biennale of Sydney
Until September 16, 2012
Sydney
Eva Kot’áková, Educational Model, 2009, metal and wooden construction composed of tables and stools, 300 x 400 x 500cm
Courtesy the artist; hunt kastner artworks, Prague; and Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe
Robin Rhode, Arm Chair, 2011, single channel digital animation, 1:20min
Courtesy the artist and White Cube, London
