3 artists, 3 projects, 3 sites
Australia at the 2007 Venice Biennale
Commissioner John Kaldor AM
Senior Curatorial Advisor Juliana Engberg
www.australiavenicebiennale.com.au
venice2007@ozco.gov.au
Newly commissioned projects by three Australian artists will be located at three sites in Venice: Susan Norrie at Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, Daniel von Sturmer at the Australian Pavilion and Callum Morton at Palazzo Zenobio.
Susan Norrie explores the pervasive geopolitical issues of a planet in turmoil in her video installation at Palazzo Giustinian Lolin. HAVOC brings together images of environmental trauma and cultural belief. Focusing on the tumultuous disaster zone of East Java, Norrie has followed the volcanic, seismic and climate disturbances which have wrought devastation to the Indigenous peoples of the area. Norries work bears witness to a return to ancient rituals in response to a deluge of mud. Underground music collides with mud and mysticism in a sensory overload.
Daniel von Sturmer will continue his experiments with space through an architectural intervention, The Object of Things, especially designed for the Australian Pavilion. What is the interaction between pictorial space and real space, between expectation and perception? A continuous platform supports video projections playing with painterly values and everyday objects. It moves into, over, around and through the space, shifting height and direction as it goes. The play of the perceptible will unfold and punctuate the pavilions membrane.
Callum Morton is known for his large-scale, architecturally inspired installations. Valhalla, at Palazzo Zenobio, is a ruined building, his childhood home: torched, sutured together and shot through with holes .. a monument to all those skeletal structures left dangling after disaster strikes. But this dilapidated domestic exterior is no ordinary ruin. Visitors can enter the ruin to find an immaculate interior space, a corporate cavity where lifts plummet, seismic shudders are felt and muzak soothes. Allusions to the catastrophe movies of Hollywood, ground zero, and various war zones are coupled with the traumatic site of domestic destruction.
The Australia Council for the Arts
The Australia Council has managed and funded Australian representation for more than 30 years. Previous Australian representatives at the Venice Biennale include Judy Watson, Howard Arkley, Patricia Piccinini and Ricky Swallow.
