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Zones of Contact: The 2006 Sydney Biennale (Contd)
Dr. Charles Merewether was Artistic Director and Curator of the 2006 Sydney Biennale and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Cross Cultural Research, Australian National University. An art historian, he was Collections Curator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles between 1994-2004. Through Dr. Merewether’s curatorial vision,the Sydney Biennale 2006 produced “what could be the most confronting Biennale for many years”. His take was at first glance the external world of war and conflict, of cultural difference and exchange but ultimately he wanted to do “a show that tried to interfere in the way in which contemporary art was being seen”. Having served on the advisory boards of the Johannesburg, Istanbul and Sao Paulo biennales, Dr. Merewether brought in a broad understanding of inter-cultural dialogue in the Sydney Biennale and his curatorial work, writing, teaching and editing in countries as diverse as Spain, Japan, Turkey, China, South Africa and Mexico, as well as his extensive list of visiting professorships, demonstrates an enduring commitment to education and the potential to actively engage the local communities.
Titled, Zones of Contact, the 2006 Sydney Biennale was presented much like a public tender or a public announcement, this Biennale aspired “to be about the ‘now’ of the contemporary, bearing the disjuncture and discontinuities as much as correspondences and traversal movements of encounter and exchange. To do so, is to think of the present as successive points of intersection and zones of contact, as we inhabit it. Always in motion, the contemporary constitutes a plural history that is fragmentary, inconclusive, without totality. Art speaks from within, and of the co-existence of heterodox and divergent contemporary cultures in which we have played a part. These are our histories imbricated as we are in the tragic events of violence and destruction as much as the dreams and realization of peaceful co-habitation and conviviality. The works resolutely sought to expose the fault-lines of the present in which the past persists and the future is uncertain. It is an event of which the present is constitutive and therefore never complete, but always taking place”.
Right from the beginning, when the Sydney Biennale was conceptualized in 2003, formalized in 2004 and finally realized in 2006, Zones of contact was the subject/concept that Merewether insisted on referring to, he was not interested in designating it as a theme, it was a conceptual framework that seemed to generate from the phrase itself- Zones of contact- and a way of characterizing would be “a poetics of politics”. Merewether wanted to bring together two things; firstly, the experience that audiences have when they engage with work; that moment of exchange; that moment of contact and secondly, the space that is constructed through the presentation or installation of work, referring to a zone and then zones of contact in the broader social dimensions of the meeting of people, of individuals, of communities, of across cultures, which brings us to a series of issues, series of reference points, not least of, which is colonialism and globalization.
As Merewether says, “what struck me at the outset was that there were legacies of colonialism that had residual effects, even in places like Australia, and here…in some ways that may not be necessarily clear, but nonetheless, colonialism still seemed to me to be lurking around, and it had in some cases mowed its way into other forms…and at the same time globalization…now this is obviously a tricky subject to talk about. There are different ways to talk about globalization, it is an uneven concept in terms of its application, in fact, there may be economic globalization but that doesn’t mean at all that there may be globalization at the social level…China is a good example, it seems to me there is increasing pressure towards economic globalization, India may be another case, but I cannot speak about it in detail, but my experience of being a China watcher is the idea of uneven development vis-à-vis globalization; you can have a rhetoric of economic impact and also to practices which effect economic globalization, but not social, in terms of its ability to inform and impact the standard of living of a majority of people in China, while the urban bourgeoisie and ruling class receive the benefits of economic globalization, rural areas remain the same. So my concern was not to talk about a globalization which is now not necessarily so clearly delineated, but to talk about this encounter between people”.
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