The Biennale is a Sydney event that hosts
various local and international heavy hitters in historical and well-established
places for the Arts. Such as the
MCA, AGNSW and Cockatoo Island.
Safari, on the other hand, is the unofficial side dish to the Biennale
of Sydney. It offers the emerging,
unrepresented and alternative Australian arts scene to the public. Despite its name, reeking of old age
jungle trips, long expeditions and endless crossings over hot heavy plains in
the hunt for big game. Safari is mostly
located in these three easy to reach locations:
Alaska Projects
Lvl 2, Kings Cross car park,
9a Elizabeth bay road
(behind the police station)
The Rocks Pop-up
13 Cambridge street
75 ½ George street (right behind the
MCA)
The Bus Projects
Saturday: Campbell Cove, The Rocks
Sunday: Taylor Square, Surry Hills
A must see would definitely be 75 ½ George
Street:
Humanizing the specter of the artist, in
the down to earth work titled ‘Day Job’, Jodie Whalen takes on mundane rituals
of 9-5 work in a self-reflexive interactive performance. Equipped with pamphlets of information,
business cards, black biros and short clips of previous work Whalen merges the
normative understanding of work with the distant, revered or disregarded work
of an artist. Whalen’s practice
explores the mundane, from simple routines to ritualistic patterns. Echoing, reducing and clarifying these
procedures in our lives, Whalen uses repetition and endurance in her work often
to address the absurdity of day-to-day existence. Discussing her entire practice in a mini office-like space there
are strange jumps between understanding Whalen as artist, as agent, as having
an immediate individual conversation or catching on the fact that the
information she dishes out has been repeated countless times.
Another fantastic piece is Huw Lewis’ creation
of the disturbing nighttime place of a child’s bedroom in ‘Dead to the world’. A sleeping figure, distorted childhood
productions, like small crude figurines of heroes or villains and wax crayon
sketches inspired by tv shows and comic books, occupy a small room in the town
house at 75 ½ George Street. But not
all is as it seems, and similar to waking in the middle of the night, and
darkness making the toys in your bedroom sinister and watchful, all the detail
and relationships between objects created in this fictional space reveal dark
and disturbing connections. The
interrelatedness between all the objects comes together to create a sense of
muted horror, which I believe stems from a bizarre feeling of familiarity. All the objects in the room have been
fabricated, obviously so, there are no attempts at visual realism, at trompe
l’oeil. There is the obvious
presence of material and the artist’s hand. But that is simply the consideration of surfaces. What Lewis manages to do is capture a startling
authenticity in his production; the room feels like it was modeled on a real
child’s room. The bedroom feels
like it has been played in, lived in, that the space has been occupied, is occupied. So our presence in the room, our
intrusion into the silent sleeping tableaux, is like a stranger stumbling through time and space, to a boy's bedroom that has been physically infused with subconscious terrors.
Other fantastic work is at this venue, and
I think it was my favourite for the way the works that really filled, and had a
sense of, the spaces they inhabited.
Even sound works that usually bleed out and intrude on the readings of
other pieces managed to cohabitate peacefully and productively. Daniel McKewer’s video piece in
particular with its waves of stuttering digital crash never once argued, in my
opinion, with Julian Day’s ongoing sonorous vibrations.
Alas Alas Safari is at its end, with only
one more weekend to go. My
suggestion for this week is to ignore the Biennale for a couple of days and
head down to those three venues.
For more information about look at the Safari website.
