TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation
The TarraWarra Biennial was inaugurated in 2006 as a platform for identifying new trends in contemporary Australian art through an experimental curatorial platform. The 2016 Biennial is a collaboration between TarraWarra Museum of Art and the Melbourne-based contemporary art journal, Discipline. Evolving from the structuring principles of the biennial and the serial publication format, the exhibition addresses forms of continuity and circulation, pauses and punctuations. It is alternately shaped by serial and cyclic rhythms—of production and exposure, hosts and dispersals, concentration and diffusion.
Biennials and magazines both take the form of an edition. They are continuous, one edition after another, but punctuated by pauses. As well as being additive or iterative, biennials and magazines produce contrasting modes of circulation. Where biennials typically bring artists and artworks from all around the world to one place for a designated period of time (a centripetal movement), magazines disperse—they (ideally) move away from their site of origin through postal systems, emails and downloads (a centrifugal movement).
The exhibition brings together a range of works that explore continuity by bringing their past and future into the same frame, as well as projects that are predicated on their centrifugal circulation outside the parameters of traditional art spaces. Many works featured in the exhibition use these methods to unveil aspects of Australia’s colonial history and its persistence in the present; others reveal the social, economic and political histories of their own making, or attempt to anticipate their future trajectories—travelling through the marketplace, gradually adapting to new contexts, or degrading over time.
The participating artists include 3-ply x Centre for Style, Monica’s Gallery, Jessie Kiely ∞ Vernon Ah Kee ∞ Robert Andrew ∞ Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley ∞ Susan Cohn ∞ Sarah crowEST ∞ Saskia Doherty ∞ Debris Facility ∞ Alicia Frankovich ∞ Newell Harry ∞ Bianca Hester ∞ Biljana Jancic ∞ Helen Johnson ∞ Julia McInerney ∞ Vincent Namatjira ∞ Ryan Presley ∞ Eugenia Raskopoulos ∞ Masato Takasaka ∞ James Tylor ∞ Wrong Solo (Brian Fuata and Agatha Gothe-Snape) ∞ Wukun Wanambi ∞ 4th/5th Melbourne Artist Facilitated Biennial (Christopher L G Hill, Nick Selenitsch, Lou Hubbard, Lewis Fidock, Endless Lonely Planet, Liam Osborne, Lisa Radford, Elizabeth Newman, Nicholas Tammens, Kate Meakin, George Egerton-Warburton, James Deutsher, Zac Segbedzi, Aurelia Guo, Rudi Williams, Alex Vivian, Lucina Lane, Lauren Burrow, Counterfeitnessfirst, Virginia Overell, Joshua Petherick, Laurel Doody, Tahi Moore, elp3 Vine, and more…).
