19th Biennale of Sydney | MCA talks

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) will present a series of artistic projects from renowned and first-time local and international contemporary visual artists for the ‘19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire’. One of five venues to host the Biennale, the MCA will show more than 80 works by 19 artists in the Museum’s Level 1 and Level 3 Galleries.

Drawing on the elements of air and water, all of the artworks delve into the realms of the imaginative and the surreal revealing the inventions and intimate desires of the exhibiting artists.

In Phantom (2011), the mixed-media installation by Scottish artist Douglas Gordon made in collaboration with musician Rufus Wainwright, viewers enter a room enveloped by darkness. Here a wooden stage is set with the remains of a burnt piano lying beside a new Steinway. Overseeing the stage is a screen projecting one of Wainwright’s heavily made-up eyes, opening and closing as his voice echoes through the space.

Inside the Museum’s double-height gallery space a site-specific video installation by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist titled Mercy Garden Retour Skin (2014), invites viewers to immerse themselves in a dreamy, sensual pleasure-world created from vivid colour and light. Rist’s work celebrates the minutiae of daily life, often incorporating elements of nature in her examination of themes of gender, sexuality and the human body.

An exploration of time in David Claerbout’s The Quiet Shore (2011) is made visually explicit in a series of black and white images in a 36-minute silent film to be shown at the MCA. The film set in Brittany, France captures scenes that range from moments of minute details to panoramic expanses of coastal landscape. Claerbout’s work allows viewers to experience, frame by frame, a single moment from a multitude of different perspectives and viewpoints articulating time as something almost tangible.

Gracing the cover of Art Almanac’s April 2014 issue is the work of English artist John Stezaker. Stezaker’s photomontages are based on images he collects from the past with a particular focus on film stills, cinematic portraits and nostalgic postcards. At the MCA, Stezaker will present a collection of close to forty works with strong overtones of surrealism that at their core repurpose memory and perception.

Other artists exhibiting at the MCA include James Angus, Benjamin Armstrong, Martin Boyce, Nathan Coley, Hubert Czerepok, Aurélien Froment, Roni Horn, Jim Lambie, TV Moore, Emily Roysdon, Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger, Corin Sworn and Emily Wardill.

Visitors to the MCA will encounter a rich exploration of how the interconnection between imagination and desire, alluded to in the title, is uniquely forged by                                                                                                     the exhibiting artists.

Biennale Artist Talks
MCA Galleries
Saturday 22 March, 11am–1.30pm; Free
Hear artists Søren Thilo Funder, David Claerbout, Aurélien Froment and Emily Roysdon speak about their work and practice.

In conversation: Juliana Engberg (Artistic Director of the 19th Biennale of Sydney)  with artists Deborah Kelly, Callum Morton and John Stezaker
Veolia Lecture Theatre
Saturday 22 March, 2–3pm; Free

Special Curators’ Insight: Biennale of Sydney
MCA Galleries
Friday 21 Mar, 4.30–5pm; Free
Hear insights into the work of Douglas Gordon from MCA Assistant Director, Curatorial and Digital, Blair French.

 

Douglas Gordon, Phantom, 2011, (video still) stage, screen, black Steinway piano, burned Steinway piano and monitor, dimensions variable
Courtesy lost but found; Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris; and Rufus Wainwright, ‘All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu’ used courtesy Decca Label Group Copyright © lost but found; Rufus
Wainwright; and VG Bild-Kunst, Germany (2013)

John Stezaker, Mask CXLIX, 2010, collage
Courtesy and © the artist and The Approach, London

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