Last Weekend of Biennale

By Ben Stephens.

Maybe it is true; the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The tag line for the 20^th Biennale of Sydney. This weekend will mark the end of the festival of artsy goodness that has taken over seven embassies across the city from Cockatoo Island to Carriageworks and everywhere in between. I don’t want you to stress about what to see before the Biennale disappears for another 730 odd days, so I wrote you little list to tick off this before Sunday at 5pm to get the most out of the last drop from the Biennale bottle.

Cockatoo Island

Get on that Cockatoo Island bound ferry and enjoy a day on what many seem to call Instagram Nirvana. You could easily spend an entire day walking all over the island, checking out the exhibits from the Biennale artists and then finish with a long lunch at the island’s bar, looking back to the city. But you have a time limit, so make that lunch a little shorter and spend more time in front of the Korakrit Arunanondchai cinematographic piece Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 – a personal favourite of the mine, as conceptual as it comes.

Carriageworks

Once you get back from the island or maybe before you go, Carriageworks is playing its part as the Embassy of Disappearance, toying with the idea of absence of memory and fading history. The hot tip here is the work by Minouk Lim, a south Korean artist that has managed to suspend a shipping container off the ground, raising ideas around absent stories. It’s very thought provoking, as he links it to human movement in today’s world, jesting towards a dark sense of migration and risk taking.

Art Gallery of New South Wales

Four white walls, elevated flooring, close to the city – sounds like a Darlinghurst property listing, though is in fact the description of a totally mad installation by Japanese artist Taro Shinoda titled Abstraction of Confusion. The Art Gallery of New South Wales, will no doubt be the place to be this weekend with so many Biennale Artist exhibiting in such close proximity to one another.

20^th Biennale of Sydney, thank you everything – see you in 2018.

The Biennale is open everyday from 10am until June 5.