Sydney Contemporary
Sydney Contemporary, for the past four years, has been a microcosmic study of the Australian art market: its symbiotic relationship with international markets and its major galleries. In many ways this year should be no different. More than eighty-five international and Australian galleries are set to participate in the fair (representing artists from over thirty countries), including seventeen new additions.
The traditional way of framing this event, like all of its kind, is as a valuable chance for artists and their galleries to spend some time in the land of financial fertility that the fair cultivates.
However, this year’s fifth edition of Sydney Contemporary also includes a bountiful program of performance and installation work. Much of it is politically radical, affectively-driven, and difficult to position as (financially) value-producing. Chun Yin Rainbow Chan celebrates matrilineal knowledge exchange by teaching visitors a Weitou lullaby through a veil of smoked latex flowers; Marcus Whale and Athena Thebus reimagine Lucifer, the fallen angel, as a queer icon; Leila El Rayes and Harry Pickering experiment with unspoken social norms and dynamics in their participatory piece Soft Core Bondage Fairies.
The emphasis on performance, here – along with installations and ‘Kid Contemporary’ (featuring Jason Phu) – appears to signal a shift in the values that the fair strives to promote. The claim seems to be that, even at a commercial art fair such as ‘Sydney Contemporary’, art might not be the market’s handmaid so much as its happy co-conspirator.
EXHIBITION
Sydney Contemporary
12 – 15 September 2019
Carriageworks, Sydney
I met with Gary Deirmendjian in his studio, or one aspect of it at least, at a café in Sydney’s Kings Cross. He is self-described...
Adam Douglas Hill (AKA Blak Douglas) is an attention-seeking artist. Seemingly on the fringes of the art world but also something of a celebrity whose...
With the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney recently announcing the reintroduction of admission fees from February 2025, there has been a renewed...
The colonial spasm that started in the seventeenth century, that saw the world carved up to fuel capitalism and created a socio-political landscape that led...
On his visit to Australia in 1968 the American art critic Clement Greenberg encouraged young artists to “enjoy their diversity”—advice Jock Clutterbuck appreciated. As a...
Here are brief segments pulled from fieldnotes that emerged from the beginning of the first two weeks of my fieldwork in the rural town of...
Bathurst has inspired the exhibition yet it’s not an exhibition about Bathurst. My mum grew up there. My grandparents and uncle had a farm there,...
The typical arc of a mid-career retrospective exhibition is that of an artist arriving at a fully formed artistic style. But this major exhibition is...
It’s not as though the national attitude toward acts of terrorism was more permissive in the past. Thank you very much, 2006, in which footage...
