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Zones of Contact: The 2006 Sydney Biennale
The choices that Merewether made were difficult for he was battling with numbers, and always knowing that there were limits in terms of budget and venues. He chose sixteen venues across Sydney and also designed a public program that would run over three months, including three symposiums, artist talks, & workshops. The first symposium was about the phenomenon of international exhibitions/biennales, what they are and for; the second symposium was on art history and theory and writing of contemporary art, while the third symposium focused on divergent art practices and artist talks. Zones of Contact symbolically stood for the encounter between people, this concern weaved into all aspects of the Biennale in terms of the public programming and exhibitions, and its real sense of its subject being addressed was about exchange and seeking a kind of third space, of conviviality and hospitality towards one another, where one invites one for a meal and discusses one’s differences and commonalities. Merewether elaborates “I wanted this Biennale to symbolically stand for that and to try and breach those differences and indeed commonalities. In the period of which this Biennale was being put together, I discovered indeed how greatly Australia was in need for that. This Biennale was in fact a sort of challenge in terms of who I invited, it was really a challenge to the hegemonic West vis-à-vis the fact that we are bereft of so much information. The Western media dominates what is written about and it surprised me that even in a place like Australia or Sydney how little they knew of what was going on the parts of the world, India, Middle East, etc. it is as if history had stopped for them, it seemed that these place either represented an ancient culture or contemporary conflict”. Many Australian national galleries now do collect art from India but is till the moderns only, as if there is nothing more beyond that, nothing contemporary, and this seemed to him endemic of an attitude which is propagated by the Western media and in fact by art magazines who have their eyes on work that is happening in London, Los Angeles, New York etc. “The issue becomes very important and I would like to think that a Biennale and the one that I have done brings into frame challenges the status quo, challenges the hegemonic way in which history is written, that is when people think of good artists, it is just not Western artists, but they change the way they think about contemporary art, in the values that matter, and they change the language in which they think. This is a big issue and it is well overdue that the people who write contemporary art history, their reference points are not just Frank Stellas or Richard Sierras of the world.”
One might argue that the phenomenon of Biennales is exclusionist, bracketing artists who fall within internationalist trends, but Merewether welcomes the proliferation of biennales. “If a city wants to do it and they think it will benefit their community in terms of fostering relations with other countries, well and good. Undoubtedly there is a national project here—the Biennale is a federally funded national institution. The public goes to national institutions: but they can come away with more than they expected. My intention has been to create as close as possible something that partakes of the world. I’ve tried to make it an integrated project, to map the breadth of the participation over the breadth of Sydney…There’s no hierarchy in the event, no hierarchy in the work, or among the artists.” and on the question of how the art object is able to transact the difficulties of cross-cultural contact, he says that it ultimately “comes down to art’s ability to synthesise and to present a case, or to embody an idea, made in reflection. There’s really no other form. Other forms are oral history and testimony, but testimony is often unbelievable. The most interesting artists are engaged in re-elaboration, rather than testimony or reliving the moment. They have the ability to create an image that embodies an experience or event, without simply documenting it”.
Ultimately, any curated event reflects the curators’ vision, his/her subjective view-point, and Zones of Contact was an ambitious project, one that allowed Merewether to realize his aesthetic and political position that reflects a state of the world, not about globalization per se, “but about the movement of people in a positive and negative sense, and about the plight of being seen to be a foreigner”. One must congratulate him for realizing such a grand project, of the inclusiveness of the ‘Other’, revealing a sensibility that is not only highly imaginative but a vision that seeks constantly to deconstruct and reshape constructed hegemonic hierarchies in the global art world.
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