Tent Embassy Goes Global As Venice Sees Australia In Three Dimensions

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday May 24, 2006

Emily Dunn

A SILENT black-and-white video of the now-dismantled Aboriginal tent embassy on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra will find an unlikely projection space in the historic city of Venice.

The video installation, Black Wind, was filmed in June last year by the Sydney artist Susan Norrie, one of three artists chosen by the Australia Council to exhibit at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

The Melbourne artists Daniel von Sturmer and Callum Morton will join Norrie in Venice from June to November next year for the biennial event, considered the world's most important critical forum for contemporary visual art.

But while von Sturmer will follow in the footsteps of artists such as Arthur Boyd and exhibit in the "traditional" space of the Australian Pavilion, Norrie and Morton will become the first artists to represent Australia at biennale-designated spaces around the city.

Norrie, 52, said she was excited at the prospect of exhibiting outside the pavilion, and will visit Venice next month to look at suitable spaces.

Next year she plans to take four video installations - including Black Wind, first shown at the Adelaide Festival - drawing on geopolitical issues such as nuclear proliferation and the plight of indigenous Australians.

"The works deal with the issues of 'other' and the repressed," Norrie says. "I think film is such a wonderful way of capturing a moment in time, like when you look over your shoulder and see something but then it is gone."

Morton, 40, will show an outdoor architectural work of a similar scale to Babylonia, the craggy island that housed a hotel corridor which he exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art last year. In the pavilion, von Sturmer, 34, will show video installations blending aspects of painting with kinetic sculpture and architecture.

The commissioner of the Australian exhibition, John Kaldor, said sending three artists next year would allow Australian art to gain greater exposure, within and outside the pavilion.

"The biennale is the Olympics of contemporary art, a gathering of the most important museum directors, critics and writers, and is a unique opportunity to show off our achievements," Kaldor says.

"The Australian contemporary art scene is so vibrant and there are so many good artists, I wanted to show the breadth and width of Australian art. Any one artist would have been difficult to do it justice."

The Venice Biennale was established in 1895, and now includes 28 countries exhibited in the Giardini di Castello, or pavilions. Sidney Nolan was the first Australian representative in 1954.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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