MCA: The Gem of the Biennale

TV Moore, installation view 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, created for the 19th Biennale of Sydney, photo:Ben Symons

140 George St, The Rocks

by Monique Clark

Take a journey through the imagination of 20 Artists from all over the globe. The 19th annual Biennale of Sydney brings the ideas and creative dreams of a plethora of Artists to a pinnacle at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

This years theme: ‘You Imagine What You Desire’ celebrates the imagination as a spirited exploration of the world through metaphor and poiesis. Juliana Engberg is the curator behind the event and has described the thematic exploration as an introspective of “active desiring” and how it is essential to the human condition. “It’s an insatiable desire to create, to ‘example’ something, to reformulate, to imagine the possible.”

At the MCA artworks by over 20 artists will be presented across two floors, drawing on the elements of air and water, as well as the realms of the imaginative and the surreal.

LEVEL 1 GALLERIES

Featuring new work by Glasgow-based artist Jim Lambie and a site-specific video installation by renowned Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, commissioned especially for the MCA’s expansive Northern gallery. In Rist’s Mercy Garden Retour Skin (working title) (2014), viewers will be able to immerse themselves in a sensual pleasure world created from vivid colour and light.

Elsewhere at the MCA, the Biennale will also feature the work of acclaimed Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, the first video artist to win the Turner Prize, and influential American artist Roni Horn. Gordon will present a large-scale, mixed media installation featuring the haunting voice of singer Rufus Wainwright. The dramatic installation, Phantom (2011), takes the audience on a rapturous journey. Darkness and light, tragedy, and salvation through redemptive love are the ideas and emotions encountered here.

Pipilotti Rist, Mercy Garden Retour Skin, 2014, installation view 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, courtesy the artist; Hauser & Wirth; and Luhring Augustine, created for the 19th Biennale of Sydney and made possible through the generous support of Andrew Cameron Family Foundation, photograph: Victoria Baldwin

LEVEL 3 GALLERY

Horn will present Ten Liquid Incidents (2010–12), an installation of ten solid-cast glass sculptures which engages with ideas of materiality, mutability and perception. The meditative work draws on the artist’s ongoing investigation of the weather and landscape, in particular her personal relationship to Iceland.

Roni Horn, Nine Liquid Incidents, 2010–12, installation view 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, courtesy Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, The presentation of this project was made possible through the generous support of Simon and Catriona Mordant, photo: Limuel Martine