Major gallery misses out as Sydney's biggest arts festival heads west

If it was up to this artist, all his creations would be Untitled

Sydney Morning Herald

5 days ago

Sydney Morning Herald

If it was up to this artist, all his creations would be Untitled

Very often, says Cerith Wyn Evans, exhibitions of his work – whether that work is a box of photographs or the huge, spiky webs of neon lights he is showing in Sydney - are shaped principally by the spaces where they are shown. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, he is particularly excited by the prospect of opening all the windows onto Circular Quay. Light will pour in, along with the sounds of the harbour. 'We are opening up the entire façade!' he enthuses. 'And because it is right on the quay, there are thousands of tourists walking up and down, boats coming and going, really a hustle and bustle outside which is extremely vital – and very unlike a museum.' Wyn Evans, 67, has represented Wales at the Venice Biennale, exhibited all over the world and is represented by galleries in seven cities, but this is his first solo show in Australia. His earliest works were in experimental film; he says he regarded them as essentially sculptures, but he has always played fast and loose with disciplinary categories. He also has a magpie's eye for influences and quotations. Having grown up speaking Welsh, he is particularly interested in forms of language reflecting specialist uses, from Morse code to dance notation, which frequently appear in his work. But he is seemingly curious about almost everything. In a single sentence, he touches on Chinese medicine, yoga, mathematics and optics. 'What I'm attempting to do is run all of that through a scrambling mill,' he says. 'If we somehow feed them all through each other, we arrive at something that is a kind of form.' This exhibition, mostly drawn from his own collection, focuses on his big neon works made over the last 10 years. Wyn Evans isn't worried about the neon being drained by all that daylight. 'It lessens the impact, which is what I'm looking for. We're not making a sci-fi movie with futuristic neons,' he says. 'It's about looking at light. To me, there is nothing more beautiful than seeing a neon in blazing white sunshine. It's so compromised it becomes almost tender: it becomes more poetic, becomes broken somehow as a force for consumerism or legibility.' I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say. The first neon signs, he says, were made as advertising. 'But artists have been working with neon since the 1930s. Then, with pop art and conceptualism, a lot of artists tried to popularise their materials so they were not working with bronze or marble, expensive rare materials, in order to somehow attach that value to the sculpted object.' Wyn Evans himself worked initially in film, he has said elsewhere, because it provided an escape route from that hierarchy of materials. In recent times, he has been making mobiles with broken car windows from wrecking yards: materials that cost nothing, but that allude both to the cracked The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp – one of his artistic beacons – and to the daily disaster of the smashed mobile phone, a real-world reference. 'We're all dealing with these sorts of screens; we're all confronting this the entire time.' There are plenty of scrambled signifiers everywhere in the exhibition, in fact, with Noh theatre as a dominant theme. Wyn Evans first went to Japan 37 years ago as a visiting professor at Kyushu University in the country's subtropical south, a tough area known for its mining and steel industries – Richard Serra, he says, has his works cast in its huge foundries – as well as palm trees and spectacularly fresh sushi. He loved it. 'It became urgent to me that whatever I did on this trip to Japan, I got to secure my next trip. And it's been like this ever since. I spend two months a year there.' During that time, he might see three Noh performances a week. For an experimental artist, Noh's prescribed rhythms and gestures are surely an ostensibly incongruous passion? 'It's not, actually,' he says. 'The aleatory aspects of Noh are vast. Nothing is rehearsed. There are no lighting cues. It's a bit like a marathon; there is an elasticity to it.' He glows as he recounts a visit to a Noh school where the master's 106-year-old mother not only made sweets but danced for the visitors. 'She's extraordinary, about this tall' – very small – 'bent over double, you have to fight off the tears, you know.' It should be added that today, as usual, he is wearing Japanese traditional dress: a snow-white kimono and trousers. Old ladies in the supermarket often ask him about it, he says. 'I say it's my workwear.' The titles of his work point towards this source of inspiration, among others, but the works themselves don't spell it out; if someone looks up Noh on the internet and ends up watching a snippet of this ancient, precise and poetic blend of theatre and dance, that would be 'absolutely great'. If not, fine. 'I don't think Cerith is a didactic artist in the slightest,' says curator Lara Strongman. 'I don't think he's thinking this is my meaning and here you are. I think he's the opposite of that, that he argues for slippage, for mutability, for the different possibilities coming in from different people, much as the work manifests the idea of fragments of things taken from here and there.' Everything slants Japanese, however, in the exhibition's design. Stepping stones like those found in traditional gardens lead the viewer, providing different angles and points of view on the works. 'You have to position yourself here, then there, to take another step,' says Strongman. 'It's a way of really grounding yourself, this sense of thinking about your own passage through time and space as you walk.' Following the path, the works loom in your way. 'So you have to stop and think about them. You get a real sense of your own bodily presence; you can see through the works to other works and your view is changing the whole time. You're aware of yourself in a way we often aren't, because we're mediating our lives through a tiny screen.' The materials may be obviously industrial but, she says, 'it's the most analogue exhibition I've ever worked on. It's a show that asks you to spend some human time with it.' Loading Words, whether it be a wall full of Marcel Proust's work rendered in Japanese or one of his elaborately flourished titles, are ostensibly central to this work. Wyn Evans particularly loves a homonym; one show he did in Britain was called Cite/Sight/Site. 'They sound the same, but you can prise them open to find a myriad of associations and construct this little model where you create these interstitial spaces between' – he fishes for two sufficiently disparate elements – 'a quote from Elizabeth Bishop and the plan of the Alhambra.' He says he thinks of language and communication as distinct materials, on a par with light, air and time, even suggesting as a title for this piece 'For want of a better word' to represent the way he chews over them. 'I'm forever, in a sense, converting thoughts into language, but I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say.' Loading It is thus not entirely surprising when he says he would prefer not to have any titles at all. 'Whatever doesn't embarrass me kind of gets through but, if it were up to me, I would call everything Untitled.' He feels no obligation to explain himself. 'They can buy you that red herring space in order to come in with something from underneath,' he says. 'But there is a certain resistance in the work also. I don't lose sleep over people not understanding it. Children are perfectly happy running around, just enjoying the awe of it. And I try not to be judgmental or to take it personally if people don't like it. Why should I play by someone else's rules? I'm not a politician, after all. I'm an artist.'

The Age

5 days ago

The Age

If it was up to this artist, all his creations would be Untitled

Very often, says Cerith Wyn Evans, exhibitions of his work – whether that work is a box of photographs or the huge, spiky webs of neon lights he is showing in Sydney - are shaped principally by the spaces where they are shown. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, he is particularly excited by the prospect of opening all the windows onto Circular Quay. Light will pour in, along with the sounds of the harbour. 'We are opening up the entire façade!' he enthuses. 'And because it is right on the quay, there are thousands of tourists walking up and down, boats coming and going, really a hustle and bustle outside which is extremely vital – and very unlike a museum.' Wyn Evans, 67, has represented Wales at the Venice Biennale, exhibited all over the world and is represented by galleries in seven cities, but this is his first solo show in Australia. His earliest works were in experimental film; he says he regarded them as essentially sculptures, but he has always played fast and loose with disciplinary categories. He also has a magpie's eye for influences and quotations. Having grown up speaking Welsh, he is particularly interested in forms of language reflecting specialist uses, from Morse code to dance notation, which frequently appear in his work. But he is seemingly curious about almost everything. In a single sentence, he touches on Chinese medicine, yoga, mathematics and optics. 'What I'm attempting to do is run all of that through a scrambling mill,' he says. 'If we somehow feed them all through each other, we arrive at something that is a kind of form.' This exhibition, mostly drawn from his own collection, focuses on his big neon works made over the last 10 years. Wyn Evans isn't worried about the neon being drained by all that daylight. 'It lessens the impact, which is what I'm looking for. We're not making a sci-fi movie with futuristic neons,' he says. 'It's about looking at light. To me, there is nothing more beautiful than seeing a neon in blazing white sunshine. It's so compromised it becomes almost tender: it becomes more poetic, becomes broken somehow as a force for consumerism or legibility.' I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say. The first neon signs, he says, were made as advertising. 'But artists have been working with neon since the 1930s. Then, with pop art and conceptualism, a lot of artists tried to popularise their materials so they were not working with bronze or marble, expensive rare materials, in order to somehow attach that value to the sculpted object.' Wyn Evans himself worked initially in film, he has said elsewhere, because it provided an escape route from that hierarchy of materials. In recent times, he has been making mobiles with broken car windows from wrecking yards: materials that cost nothing, but that allude both to the cracked The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp – one of his artistic beacons – and to the daily disaster of the smashed mobile phone, a real-world reference. 'We're all dealing with these sorts of screens; we're all confronting this the entire time.' There are plenty of scrambled signifiers everywhere in the exhibition, in fact, with Noh theatre as a dominant theme. Wyn Evans first went to Japan 37 years ago as a visiting professor at Kyushu University in the country's subtropical south, a tough area known for its mining and steel industries – Richard Serra, he says, has his works cast in its huge foundries – as well as palm trees and spectacularly fresh sushi. He loved it. 'It became urgent to me that whatever I did on this trip to Japan, I got to secure my next trip. And it's been like this ever since. I spend two months a year there.' During that time, he might see three Noh performances a week. For an experimental artist, Noh's prescribed rhythms and gestures are surely an ostensibly incongruous passion? 'It's not, actually,' he says. 'The aleatory aspects of Noh are vast. Nothing is rehearsed. There are no lighting cues. It's a bit like a marathon; there is an elasticity to it.' He glows as he recounts a visit to a Noh school where the master's 106-year-old mother not only made sweets but danced for the visitors. 'She's extraordinary, about this tall' – very small – 'bent over double, you have to fight off the tears, you know.' It should be added that today, as usual, he is wearing Japanese traditional dress: a snow-white kimono and trousers. Old ladies in the supermarket often ask him about it, he says. 'I say it's my workwear.' The titles of his work point towards this source of inspiration, among others, but the works themselves don't spell it out; if someone looks up Noh on the internet and ends up watching a snippet of this ancient, precise and poetic blend of theatre and dance, that would be 'absolutely great'. If not, fine. 'I don't think Cerith is a didactic artist in the slightest,' says curator Lara Strongman. 'I don't think he's thinking this is my meaning and here you are. I think he's the opposite of that, that he argues for slippage, for mutability, for the different possibilities coming in from different people, much as the work manifests the idea of fragments of things taken from here and there.' Everything slants Japanese, however, in the exhibition's design. Stepping stones like those found in traditional gardens lead the viewer, providing different angles and points of view on the works. 'You have to position yourself here, then there, to take another step,' says Strongman. 'It's a way of really grounding yourself, this sense of thinking about your own passage through time and space as you walk.' Following the path, the works loom in your way. 'So you have to stop and think about them. You get a real sense of your own bodily presence; you can see through the works to other works and your view is changing the whole time. You're aware of yourself in a way we often aren't, because we're mediating our lives through a tiny screen.' The materials may be obviously industrial but, she says, 'it's the most analogue exhibition I've ever worked on. It's a show that asks you to spend some human time with it.' Loading Words, whether it be a wall full of Marcel Proust's work rendered in Japanese or one of his elaborately flourished titles, are ostensibly central to this work. Wyn Evans particularly loves a homonym; one show he did in Britain was called Cite/Sight/Site. 'They sound the same, but you can prise them open to find a myriad of associations and construct this little model where you create these interstitial spaces between' – he fishes for two sufficiently disparate elements – 'a quote from Elizabeth Bishop and the plan of the Alhambra.' He says he thinks of language and communication as distinct materials, on a par with light, air and time, even suggesting as a title for this piece 'For want of a better word' to represent the way he chews over them. 'I'm forever, in a sense, converting thoughts into language, but I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say.' Loading It is thus not entirely surprising when he says he would prefer not to have any titles at all. 'Whatever doesn't embarrass me kind of gets through but, if it were up to me, I would call everything Untitled.' He feels no obligation to explain himself. 'They can buy you that red herring space in order to come in with something from underneath,' he says. 'But there is a certain resistance in the work also. I don't lose sleep over people not understanding it. Children are perfectly happy running around, just enjoying the awe of it. And I try not to be judgmental or to take it personally if people don't like it. Why should I play by someone else's rules? I'm not a politician, after all. I'm an artist.'

Biennale of Sydney curator Hoor Al Qasimi shares title and first artists for 2026 event

ABC News

26-05-2025

ABC News

Biennale of Sydney curator Hoor Al Qasimi shares title and first artists for 2026 event

Australian artists Warraba Weatherall, Marian Abboud and Abdul Abdullah, who won the Packing Room Prize earlier this month, are among the first artists announced for the 2026 Biennale of Sydney, titled "Rememory". Fifteen Australian and 22 international artists and collectives are on the line-up, including the Decolonising Art Architecture Project from Palestine; and First Nations artists Cannupa Hanska Luger from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and Secwepemcúlecw artist Tania Willard. It's the first festival from artistic director Hoor Al Qasimi, the biennale's first Arab curator, and the first woman to be appointed since 2018. Last year, Al Qasimi, a curator from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was dubbed the most influential person in the art world. Al Qasimi heads up the UAE's Sharjah Art Foundation and Biennial, and this year becomes the first non-Japanese person to helm the Aichi Triennale, one of the world's largest international arts festivals, held in Japan. In beginning to curate next year's event in Sydney, she has visited artists working in remote communities, including Wendy Hubert, whose work also features in the Aichi Trienniale. "I want to learn more by being [in Australia]," she says. "I want to meet more artists. "Once we open, I'll be able to go to more art centres and meet more people for future projects, because I feel like there are so many [Australian] artists whose work might be relevant for any other festivals in the world," she says. The title of the 2026 Biennale of Sydney — Rememory — comes from African American writer Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved. "Re-memory was used in Beloved to look at the story of enslaved African Americans in the United States," Al Qasimi says. "It really made sense [as a title for the biennale] because it can be as open or as focused as you like. "It's about looking back. It's about memory. A lot of Indigenous communities and diaspora and people from all over the world, our stories are passed down as storytelling — it's somebody's memory that's being passed down." Al Qasimi is interested in moments in history, and who wrote that history — including whose voices were left out, for example, Indigenous communities, women, young people and the working class. "What about the voices that have been suppressed, or the voices that haven't had the platform to be able to speak about their history in their own words?" she says. A visitor to the Biennale of Sydney for the last 12 years, Al Qasimi has noticed how the festival has expanded over that time to include more of those voices. She hopes to continue that trend. While most of the artworks set to feature at next year's biennale are under wraps, one the artistic director can speak about resonates strongly with her interest in history. It's by Australian activist artists Michiel Dolk and Merilyn Fairskye, who painted a set of 16 murals in Woolloomooloo in the 80s, celebrating the suburb's people and history. Their work for the biennale will be on display close by, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The Woolloomooloo murals were painted a decade after the approval of a redevelopment proposal that planned to transform the residential area into mostly high-rise office blocks and hotel skyscrapers. To pull together this project, Al Qasimi has already spent time talking to the artists and members of the Woolloomooloo community, including a woman who was painted for the mural when she was just 13 years old. "Those are the stories I'm interested in — very personal stories," she says. The venues for the 2026 Biennale of Sydney have also been announced, with a focus on Western Sydney, as Penrith Regional Gallery joins the event for the first time. "I want to connect a lot with people in Western Sydney and the diaspora," Al Qasimi says. "I want to work with the Arab community or with the Vietnamese or Sudanese communities. "I'm interested in bringing the biennale to the people who might not be interested in art or might not be interested in going to venues that they feel are too far for them. "Sometimes a lot of museums or institutions make people feel a little bit inhibited, or they feel like it's elitist. So, what spaces are more accessible, and how do we get people to be part of the project so that they can feel like it's for them?" The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), which has hosted the biennale since 1998, is a notable omission from next year's event. In 2023, the MCA reported an operating loss of $2.6 million, which led the gallery to reintroduce entry fees earlier this year. The venues were a curatorial decision, Al Qasimi says. "With the resources [I have], I'm more interested in putting time and effort in a place that didn't have it before," she says. "I don't want to have a space where there's just a few artists here, a few artists there. I want to have a collective presence: When you go to one location, there's a lot to do and a lot to see." The biennale will also see Al Qasimi collaborate with First Nations Curatorial Fellow Bruce Johnson Mclean, and community ambassadors Claudia Chidiac and Paula Abood, who will offer advice on community engagement in Western Sydney. Last year, when Al Qasimi was announced as the next curator of the Biennale of Sydney, taking over from Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero, it was reported by one media outlet that some donors threatened to leave the festival due to Al Qasimi's support for Palestine. "To be honest, I haven't really paid attention to that," Al Qasimi says. "I try not to be bothered by a lot of these voices because I'm a guest here. "My work is with artists and caring for artists and making sure that we can do a project that is accessible to community, to people, that's inviting. A spokesperson for the biennale told ABC Arts conversations with donors are "ongoing": "The sponsors and donors change for every edition, so there is ebb and flow each time. Each edition there are returning and new donors, who decide to sponsor based on their interests and the vision for the edition." Al Qasimi wants to break down the restrictive categories used to describe artists, like 'women artists' or 'Arab artists'. She first found herself being pigeonholed when she was studying painting in London in the early 00s. "A tutor said to me: 'Your work is not very Islamic.' And I said, 'Why are you imposing this category on me?'" she recalls. "People are just people. They just want to do the work and express themselves. "As much as possible, I try to bring artists together because the things that people have faced around the world, they sometimes feel like they're facing them in isolation. "But actually it's very connected." The Biennale of Sydney runs from March 14-June 14 2026 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, Penrith Regional Gallery and White Bay Power Station.

Major gallery misses out as Sydney's biggest arts festival heads west

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If it was up to this artist, all his creations would be Untitled

If it was up to this artist, all his creations would be Untitled

Biennale of Sydney curator Hoor Al Qasimi shares title and first artists for 2026 event

Major gallery misses out as Sydney's biggest arts festival heads west

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Try Our AI Features

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If it was up to this artist, all his creations would be Untitled

If it was up to this artist, all his creations would be Untitled

Biennale of Sydney curator Hoor Al Qasimi shares title and first artists for 2026 event

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