Kaldor: Your Very Good Idea

John Kaldor, Director of Kaldor Public Art Projects has announced Sydney-based Aboriginal artist Jonathon Jones as winner of YOUR VERY GOOD IDEA, as apart of their 45th Anniversary Project.

Jonathon Jones, a member of the a member of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations of south-east Australia, is best known for his site-specific installations and interventions that explore Indigenous traditions, relationships and ideas.

Jones’ VERY GOOD IDEA titled barrangal dyara (skin and bones), calls upon national history and memory in a reawakening of the Garden Palace in the Royal Botanical Garden, Sydney. The Kaldor Public Art Projects team will work with Jones to realise his large-scale temporary art project in 2016.

The Garden Palace, completed in 1879, hosted a world’s fair known as the Sydney International Exhibition. The galleries of the Garden Palace proudly displayed wool, wheat and gold – as markers of the ‘new nation’ together with ethnographic collections collected from the frontier.  In 1882 the building burnt down, destroying troves of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultural material – leaving a profound cultural void still felt today.

Jones drew attention to such sense of national loss, stating, “While the grand nineteenth-century Garden Palace in Sydney, its history and site, speaks to industrial progress and modernisation, its dramatic and mysterious burning down and the massive loss of material held and displayed within, reminds of the power of cultural erasure and the significance of memory.”

The concept is a re-imagining of the Garden Palace animated by evocative spoken word and performance, will appeal to the national imaginary – representing both the traditional and contemporary by working with the site’s historical usage and current vision.

Nicholas Baume, Director and Chief Curator of Public Art Fund, New York commented, “This will be a breakthrough work for Jones, already one of the most interesting artists of his generation in Australia. The work has the potential to animate a part of our shared cultural history from a contemporary perspective that enables us to think about the legacy of this lost structure and the values and ideas it embodied.”

The judging panel included Jessica Morgan, Daskalopoulos Curator of International Art, Tate Modern, London, and Artistic Director of the 10th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Nicholas Baume, Director and Chief Curator of Public Art Fund, New York; Alexie Glass-Kantor, Executive Director of Artspace, Sydney; James Lingwood, Co-Director, Art Angel, London; Nick Mitzevich, Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide and John Kaldor, Director of Kaldor Public Art Projects.

Video: YOUR VERY GOOD IDEA courtesy Kaldor Public Art Projects