Art biennials and other perennial exhibitions seek to engage a public on the basis of their past achievements while simultaneously dedicating themselves to a new present. They may include some revisionary art history or even incorporate elements that restage previous shows. However, they rarely make a point of challenging the institutionalized pasts that promise to help secure more of the same types of exhibitions into the future. A symposium convened in the context of the 2018 Gwangju Biennale was deftly titled to reflect this fact, while inviting the denaturalization of those institutionalized norms: “The Goldfish Remembers.” Named as such by David Teh, to play on the myth that a goldfish has two seconds of memory, this points toward the potential of overcoming an amnesiac curatorial cycle.
I want to explore a couple of moments from a specific biennial that expressly sought to denaturalize historically established exhibition norms, interrupting their adamant repetition. I deviate from most of the writing on how curatorial efforts may consciously revisit those of the past, if only because that literature tends to center a form of devotion, if not a dogged fidelity.1 Instead, I follow Saloni Mathur’s suggestion that we study what she calls the “re-job” in order to see “what any self-conscious act of reinscription has the potential to make possible—the new ideas and communities it can activate, the nature of the discussion it can galvanize, and the new frameworks it can help to construct for viewership and debate in the present.”2
NIRIN
The entire front cover of the catalog for the 2020 Biennale of Sydney features a definition of its title in bold font. As articulated there by one of the contributing artists, Rosana Paulino: “NIRIN represents something like a spider’s web that connects people and ideas. It is the border through which things stay attached. It is not about a hierarchy of ideas, but rather …” At that point you have to open the book to learn more, with the quote concluding on the inside cover. In the final pages, artistic director Brook Andrew, who borrowed the term “nirin” from his “mother’s Wiradjuri tongue,” elaborates on the curatorial concept it ventures.3 The simplest translation is something like “edge,” which indicates a marginality that refuses “to delineate the contour of the mainstream,” to borrow from the work of Charles Gaines.4 Indeed, Andrew makes his curatorial ambitions clear: “I wanted to break what a traditional biennale is, its colonial legacy and northern hemisphere trajectory of what art is supposed to be; I wanted to bring it to its knees.”5 While the past tense used here suggests an acknowledgement of the enormity of that task, with no presumption of its success, I want to highlight a series of subtle strategies of display, marshalled in the exhibition under the banner “Powerful Objects,” in order to make the case.
Particularly provocative in the museums that hosted the 2020 Sydney Biennale, the various exhibits comprising Powerful Objects introduced material into the show that, through this categorization, were bracketed out against being art themselves. The interventions were not always obvious as such, although the labelling sought to make them clear. The exhibition leaflet included the following description: “a curated selection of historic objects and documents from private and public collections, shown across the many venues of ‘NIRIN.’ These archives form a trans-historical window through which to engage with cultural material from different places and times.”6 Moreover, visitors were encouraged to view this material from a position of historic exclusion, if not outright dispossession: “These objects are a reminder to us all that some of them are recognized and cared for in ways many people are not.”7 To address whether this curatorial act was capable of meeting the project’s anti-imperial aims, I set my sights upon how exhibition histories were thereby mobilized.
Vitrines
I first want to transport you back to “NIRIN” as it was staged in one of the imposing, nineteenth-century display spaces at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, on the ancestral lands and waters of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. In amongst a presentation of the museum’s permanent collection of “great historic works” from 1400 to 1900, the Biennale introduced two elements: contributions by participating artists, as well as Powerful Objects.8 In the particular space where I have chosen to linger, the latter featured in two display cases at the center of the room, supported on solid, dark wood tables which resonated with the Victorian-era surroundings.
The material in these vitrines came from the personal archives of Bernhard Lüthi, including correspondence, publications, and press coverage documenting his involvement in two exhibitions staged in Europe towards the end of the twentieth century. The first was “Magiciens de la Terre” (1989), promoted as a “worldwide exhibition of contemporary art,” rethinking the legacy of the Biennale de Paris, and for which Lüthi had advised on the participation of First Nations artists from Australia. The second was “ARATJARA” (1993–94), which he cocurated with Gary Foley and Charles (Chicka) Dixon from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board.9 Historicizing his practice, Lüthi has described how, unlike “Magiciens,” which involved Aboriginal people, “ARATJARA” was an exhibition “by Aboriginal people,” moving from directed participation to active agency.10 His working authorship and committed preservation of his own archive were evident within the vitrines: His annotations on sticky notes and the boxes he used for storing and transporting his documents were also present.
In reflecting on the curatorial selection, we might note that a general premise of “Magiciens” and its specific inclusion of a collaborative installation by First Nations artists from Australia were inspired by the Sydney Biennale of 1982. Jean-Hubert Martin, the curator of “Magiciens,” has remarked on how struck he was by witnessing a group of Warlpiri artists from Lajamanu installing their work in the central space of the Grand Courts of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.11 Arguably, what Martin learned in Sydney was not just the method of transplanting or co-opting artworks made for disparate contexts: how to perform an “aesthetic conversion” (Paloma Checa-Gismero) or “taxonomic shift” (Monica Juneja) through curated display.12 Somewhat more than that, the lesson lay in how to enlist the subjects of alternative artistic practices into a hegemonic curatorial project, perhaps chasing the promise of thereby recreating distinct production-reception scenarios within the traditions associated with Europe.
In other words, we might say that the Parisian initiative of 1989 sought to explore not only how an exhibition could assimilate cultural products by the “Other” into “Our Own” concept of art, but also whether “Other” histories of artistic engagement could be incorporated into “Our Own.” Of course, whether we recognize the assimilatory dangers in Paris in 1989, Sydney in 1982, or indeed New York in 1941 with “Indian Art of the United States” at the Museum of Modern Art, the bid to present challenges to the production-reception norm inherited from nineteenth-century Europe—that is, to the art exhibition—while neutering these challenges through containment, risks treachery. This was quietly redressed by “NIRIN.” In the vitrines, Lüthi’s material may have appeared to conform to the order, decorum, and values proper to the institutional context. However, if viewed closely and in conjunction with adjacent artworks commissioned for the exhibition, challenges to that order became apparent.
The atlas-sized catalog for “Magiciens de la Terre” was prominent in the display of Lüthi’s archival collection; the saturated colors of the double-paged spread dedicated to Warlpiri artists identified with Yuendumu drew the eye in particular. On the opened pages, a photograph showed a First Nations artist and their work in situ, the red pigment of the ground singing loudly below a blue sky. This could have prompted viewers to consider the land underfoot, beneath the Art Gallery’s parquet floor, and their relationships to it, as culturally mediated. We may now recall that the Lajamanu artists involved in the Sydney Biennale in 1982, when interviewed for another exhibition, refused the repeating of their published statements in any other context.13 The meanings shared—in that art, as well as the associated words—could not be acquired and repurposed, but resided with them. Instead, Lüthi’s displayed archives for “Magiciens” served to confront viewers kinaesthetically, perhaps nudging some back to the towering installation close by, as a part of “NIRIN,” in the central space of the Grand Courts at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where the Lajamanu artists had worked for the 1982 Biennale. There in 2020, textiles by Josep Grau-Garriga were suspended on steel scaffolding, in Retaule dels penjats (Altarpiece for Those Hanged, 1972–76). This work—described by the artist’s daughter, Esther Grau Quintana, as “a monumental tribute” to all anonymous martyrs—combined the intimacies of a specific immersive environment with a historical charge that is shocking in its relocated relevance.14
After seeing, under glass, a wholesale banana box used by Lüthi for holding and moving precious papers between secure homes, three large and packed but sagging nylon bags sitting incongruously on the gallery floor, opposite, may have become conspicuous. These bags, of the sort widely used for lugging possessions affordably, indeed for the decamping of entire lives, supported landscape scenes painted by three First Nations artists associated with Iltja Ntjarra (Many Hands) Art Centre: Vanessa Inkamala, Gloria Pannka, and Hillary Wirri. This installation was one of a series included in the exhibition under the title Homeless on my homeland (2018–19). Its presence was both restless and insistent in the museum.
Barricades
Turning to another section of “NIRIN,” held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, we remain on the ancestral lands and waters of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. While the institution may be distinguished from the Art Gallery of New South Wales by its modern architecture and collection of work largely acquired from living artists over the past three decades, its site could not be older in terms of the history of colonization from Europe: The initial fleet of British settlers arrived precisely here in 1788.
The centerpiece of this section of the exhibition, for my purposes, was a work that might be easily overlooked: a hard, creamy cylinder, the height of a child, propped on a trolley as if it had just arrived and would not be staying long. Viewed up close, however, patterned grooves on the surface become clear, and the Powerful Object reveals itself as a three-dimensional scan of a dendroglyph tree section, rendered in biodegradable plastic. The original tree bearing these carved grooves offered a sacred connection to place for Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi people prior to its culling by colonial settlers in Australia in the nineteenth century. The severed section was likely exhibited at the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris, when it was acquired by General Pitt Rivers, under whose museological auspices it continues to be displayed by the University of Oxford in Britain. An obstinate ghost of the living and inscribed tree, channeling the latter’s role in transhistorical, community-situated, land-based and ceremonial life through a haunting of its home continent in the Biennale, this is an object that there spoke of art’s vast range of activity outside of museums and indeed beyond cities and buildings, and also of such art’s museological capture and ongoing commodification. A clear point was made about all refusals of restitution: that these do not end the story, given the ancestral powers of the objects locked up afar, which unswervingly promise posterity to the contexts robbed.
Moreover, this object brought world fairs into view in a way that positioned not only the Sydney Biennale as an inheritor of this colonial legacy but also, via the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879, the history of the Art Gallery of New South Wales as an institution. The question then becomes: What was done with this history? This printed tree section could have been claimed as an artwork by Brook Andrew—as an artistic or artist-curator’s personal contribution to the exhibition—but this was refused in most of the institutional literature and discouraged by the lingering trolley it sat upon.15 The display of this object rejected its subsumption into the “phantasmagoria of capitalist culture” evident in world fairs (as described by Walter Benjamin for the Parisian project of 1867) and as developed since the 1980s in the name of globalization through art biennials.16 Its inclusion instead pointed away from the museum, biennial, and, more broadly, art markets, as primary arbiters of value. For those familiar with the production-reception mode it insisted upon instead, one sustained and refined over millennia by certain First Nations communities, it quietly detonated the surrounding modern-turned-contemporary edifice.
Shock waves could then be seen in adjacent Powerful Objects to either side. Take Frederick McCubbin’s oil on canvas, A Bush Burial (1890), hung on the wall behind. A melancholic settler depiction of alienation within the Australian bush, focused on familial loss of life, this work carried its own ornately carved frame while being set more broadly within the context of a mural commissioned from Eric Bridgeman and the floor-based display of paintings on bark cloth by Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka. Chiming and clashing with the Christian burial theme in the McCubbin paining, the Melanesian prose in Bridgeman’s work, Rot Bung (2020), memorialized the artist’s own familial loss while more broadly supporting what he has described as the skuat pasin (team spirit) that sustains the community he addresses by offering “coded portraits and landscapes.”17 Meanwhile, the artwork on the floor prevented visitors from getting up close to the Victorian painting. In “NIRIN,” the framed picture was denied its capacity to address visitors conventionally as an artwork, its designation as a Powerful Object directing us instead to its history of acquisition and preservation—and indeed to the possessive territorial claims thereby made.
To protect Maka’s artwork on the floor from stray feet, one might have expected to see conventional museum barriers, pretending not to be there while insistent in their rebuff. Instead, visitors found a ring of bright yellow street barricades. This urban furniture, typically used outdoors for crowd control, proved cheerful in its newfound utility within the museological realm of art, actualizing an edge (returning to the title of the show) through which we were encouraged to connect while exercising care. Repurposed with a simple pragmatism, these barricades served to puncture something of the bombast of global biennials. Moreover, they reminded viewers of the state powers and forces inextricably entwined with an object’s exhibition.
An anthropological film shot in Australia in 1949 was then screened in the same corner of “NIRIN” as yet another Powerful Object, to the other side of the 3D print on a trolley. This documented the capture of dozens of dendroglyphs from Gamilaraay/Kamilaroi ceremonial ground, where some acted as grave markers. The footage was alarming for the nonchalance of the acquisitive brutality shown in action, given the swiftness with which “an important religious and cultural place built over time immemorial” was destroyed.18 Shot and preserved for one set of reasons—for which “science” and “civilization” would not be irrelevant as terms—its screening in “NIRIN,” following careful conversations with the Gamilaraay/Kamilaroi community over how its exhibition might serve them today, exposed that which might best be described as barbarism. Its presentation marked not exhibition history but the active destruction of alternative artistic production-reception traditions.
Edges
Reflecting on a curatorial experiment at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991 that worked upon exhibition history, Saloni Mathur notes this operated “as an ambitious counter-argument, poetically and polemically conceived, to the ruinous premises of the original show.”19 The original show in question was the Nazi’s “Degenerate Art Exhibition,” and the response half a century later was meticulous in its recreation, relying on the new context for contrasting intent. However, Mathur’s point about the potential in the “re-job” is more generally relevant. The force of curatorial qua historiographic agency in her words speaks to Brook Andrew’s work with the Sydney Biennale.
Paradoxically perhaps, “NIRIN” promoted the possibilities of the exhibition form for artistic practice by reviving its critical possibilities. The show’s critique centered on past behaviors, while offering alternatives. A peripheral yet fundamental strategy, one at the edge yet holding the whole together, involved the powerful display of avowedly nonart objects. Moreover, “NIRIN” managed to hail other vital means of artistic engagement with equal but distinct potential relative to exhibitions. Combining these means, the show refused not only the nineteenth-century exhibitionary complex, as concerned with imperial and class-based governability, but also its twenty-first-century transformation into an artistic-financial complex, in which the exhibition is merely an accrual exercise for to speculative value.
Felicitously, Elitza Dulguerova has introduced the idea of new exhibitions that are a “riposte” to prior exhibitions. However, there is less dissent here than might be imagined, given the replicatory urge at issue. See Dulguerova, “L’Experience et son double: Notes sur la reconstruction d’expositions et la photographie,” Intermédialités: Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques, no. 15 (Spring 2010).
Saloni Mathur, “The Exhibition as ‘Re-Job’: Reconstructing the Bauhaus in Bengal,” in The Bauhaus in Calcutta: An Encounter of the Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde, ed. Regina Bittner et al. (Hatje-Cantz, 2013), 192.
Brook Andrew, “From the Artistic Director,” in NIRIN, exh. cat. (Biennale of Sydney, 2020), 324.
Charles Gaines, “the theater of refusal: black art and mainstream criticism,” in The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, ed. Catherine Lord (Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine, 1993), 15.
Andrew, “From the Artistic Director.”
“NIRIN” exhibition leaflet. I am grateful to Anthony Gardner for sharing this with me.
“NIRIN” exhibition leaflet.
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See →. Emphasis added.
“Overheard: Former Beaubourg Director Jean-Hubert Martin Talks with Thomas McEvilley,” Contemporanea, no. 23 (December 1990): 110.
Paloma Checa-Gismero, Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global (Duke University Press, 2024); Monica Juneja, Can Art History Be Made Global? Meditations from the Periphery (De Gruyter, 2023).
See D’un Autre Continent: L’Australie le Rêve et le Réel (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1983), 44.
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While later recorded as an artwork qua research output in Andrew’s academic profile online, its strategic disavowal within the Biennale exhibition strengthens the challenge posed to museums, which is more broadly made in his name (as the artistic director of “NIRIN”). When re-exhibited under his artistic authorship into the future, now that the 2020 Sydney Biennale is over, it performs its own act of exhibition histories in recalling “NIRIN.”
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Belknap Press, 2002), 9.
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Mathur, “Exhibition as ‘Re-Job,’” 197.
