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Zones of Contact: The 2006 Sydney Biennale
Merewether was also very aware that while this biennale was in its gestation period, there were also a continuing series of political conflict, including the occupation and harassment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli army, the second invasion of Iraq, civil war and bloody conflict as in the Balkan states, and it seemed difficult for him, in his position as a curator, to be able to produce an exhibition which was about contemporary art today without thinking about what was going on throughout the world, and especially in those countries, because through this idea, one can speak about the West vis-à-vis these other countries and this is where his take of globalization comes in.
Merewether put forward another concern of putting together this Biennale in Sydney. Being educated in Australia and having some sense of what Australia was about; its colonial heritage, of being a settlers society and having colonized indigenous people; at the same time, when he reviewed what was being shown in his home country and which seemed scandalous, Australia still looked towards United States, North America, England and to some parts of Western Europe, such as France and Germany for cultural leadership, in so far as the kinds of exhibitions that were being shown and the kinds of artists who were given monographic shows or group shows. There had virtually been no exhibitions having to do with this part of the world, Chaitanya Sambrani’s (Indian art historian and curator, based in Australia) show was yet to happen, there was very little that was shown of Pakistan; there was no art shown of the contemporary art of the Middle East, or Southern Europe, the Balkan states, or Eastern Europe, and Merewether wanted to make some correctives to that. It seemed to him that the contemporary world was a very different world from the kind of the world-picture that the Western media portrays. He is also of the opinion that the kind of work that is going on in these regions is very vital & exciting and pertinent to the issues that he was addressing; it was more engaging and exciting and more real than what was happening in Western Europe or North America, and focused on contemporary life.
Traveling for a year, Merewether chose artists from the regions of Asia, Eastern Europe and the Balkan States, the Middle East and this conglomeration made up for more than fifty percent of the show. This Biennale featured 85 artists from 44 countries, many of whom showed in Australia for the first time. With the Sydney Biennale’s mandate to include Australian artists, Merewether brought in seven Australian artists, his choices being defined to reflect different aspects of contemporary practice, such as artists who are working with the heritage of modernism, artists engaged with Aboriginal culture and cultural history, different approaches amongst Indigenous artists deeply immersed in the land; artists working with indigent Asian culture; as well as conceptual approaches. One of the things Merewether stressed on was to bring a breadth of what contemporary meant to Australian audiences and to place Australia within that context, so that issues having to do with territoriality and land is obviously important to the history of Australia, both before and now, but by addressing it through work that was going on in other places whether Palestine, the Balkans- Serbia or Bosnia for example, thereby opening up a dialogue and exchange between cultural practices across very different countries, regions and cities of the world. From the Indian Art world, artists such as Navjot Altaf (Mumbai) Shilpa Gupta (Mumbai), Amar Kanwar (Delhi), Raqs Media Collective (Delhi) and Ranjani Shettar( Bangalore) were part of this show.
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