Sydney puts on a brand-new biennial
A new biennial dedicated to contemporary Australian art looks set to reinvigorate the country’s cultural scene.
It was one of the most
successful—not to mention significant—shows on the domestic art calendar. So when Australian Perspecta announced its last exhibit in 1999, after a biennial run of 18 years, the local art community let out a collective cry. In the event’s final edition, some 76 Australian artists and 30 speakers were involved. There was some overlap with the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, which came along in 1990 with a similar remit of showcasing homegrown talent, and a few of Sydney’s larger galleries have since committed to regular themed exhibitions. But none have been on the scale of Perspecta.
“Across Australia but specifically in Sydney, there’s a lack of space for a sustained, large-scale showcase of contemporary Australian art,” says Blair French, director of curatorial and digital for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). “There is the Adelaide Biennial, but a lot of eastcoast audiences don’t get to see that.”
It was this gaping hole that led French and the MCA to team up with two of Sydney’s other premier cultural institutions, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and Carriageworks, to create The National: New Australian Art.
Launched on March 30, the multi-venue event has now created an art quadrant of sorts linking each of the galleries—in Circular Quay,