Saturday 29 July 2006 at 4pm
ARTIST TALKS: UTOPIA LIMITED, INHABITING SYDNEY
Curator Jo Holder talks to the artists about their work in Utopia Limited and how it relates to the themes of the Biennale of Sydney.

Utopia Limited adapts the Zones of Contact theme of the Biennale of Sydney to question its host city, a place where lifestyle is pathological and the charm of the surface rests on uneasy exclusions. These artists engage with the notion of urban landscape as historic archive. A politics of landscape based on entry or exclusion is brought home.

Fiona MacDonald looks at hybrid forms, seeing a Wandjina spirit in an exclusive enclave. Sue Pedley creates an ambiguous photographic portrait gallery of her neighbours. Phaptawan Suwannakudt uses Thai high religious painting to contemplate everyday notions of public and private space. Deborah Vaughan shows how military and education institutions mutate. Quick as a wink, post-war welcome becomes Cold War detention.

For Zones of Contact: 2006 Biennale of Sydney artistic director Charles Merewether brings together artists with an emphasis on the specific operational zones (East Europe, Middle East and the Balkans). The artists draw from and describe a central character, a dissonant and fractured subject who inhabits these volatile zones of contact. Oscillation between the general and the specific, global and vernacular cultures, North and South economies is this Biennales modus operandi. The aim is to prompt a consideration of where we stand, and simultaneously help us to understand unequal contests over specific localities and peoples elsewhere.

Notwithstanding, it can be difficult to anchor international artists work to the local context. Local artists and curators have argued that specialist audiences and communities can help anchor and mediate these complex arguments, bringing them home so to speak. The speakers will consider questions of location, community and audience.

Biennale of Sydney information at www.bos2006.com
August Biennale Symposium Friday 11 and Saturday 12 with Arabic Perspectives on Sunday 13 August.
E bookings@biennaleofsydney.com.au
 

More Information

Fiona MacDonald
Dream Home, Fiona MacDonald and Susan Norrie curated by Ricky Subritzky at Gfineart, Washington DC.
Catalogue at http://www.hss.uts.edu.au/dreamhome

Review in Washington Post By Jessica Dawson, 'Painting a New Visual Vocabulary', go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072101
695.html?referrer=emailarticle

Sue Pedley
www.eyelight.com.au/sue_pedley.html
Eichigo-Tsumari Art Triennial 2006: www.eichigo-tsumari.jp/eng

Phaptawan Suwannakudt
www.arc1gallery.com
www.rama9art.org/phaptawan/index2.html
www.anu.edu.au/culture/abstractions

Deborah Vaughan
http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000460b.htm
 

Related Talks

Sydney Futures Twilight Symposia, June 2006 to March 2007. The University of Technology Sydney sponsors six twilight symposia focusing on critical issues in the city's future. The symposia are held every six weeks or so, with the final event a free public forum 2 weeks out from the March 2007 state election. ‘Keeping the local in the global city’, 6 July 2006. Chair: Glen Searle (UTS) with Genia McCaffrey (mayor, North Sydney Council); Stephen McMahon (Inspire Planning); Michael Neustein (Neustein Urban).
Venue: UTS, City - Broadway, CB04. Level 2 (enter on Harris Street), Room 38. T: 9514 9933.
www.dab.uts.edu.au/symposia/sydney_futures_twilight_symposia.html

(Above) Sue Pedley, 'Clara, Ethel and Ada Streets', 2006
A project with people living in three streets in Erskineville, Sydney.
Detail comprising 28 colour photographs, each 25 x 20 cm.

 
In the aftermath of the Twin Towers atrocity, all cities have to balance responses to security and insecurity, comforts and fears, haves and have-nots. Restrictive ‘green zones’ oppose the idea of cities as haphazard responses to site, whims of style or democratic impulse. In blocks structured like resorts (aerial or flat), gated communities are proposed new city utopias providing comfort only for the haves.
 
Our segue to segregated neighbourhoods linked by private tollways has been almost unhindered despite the agitation of a few pressure groups. Public space is vanishing, polarised communities are increasing, the poor and minorities are displaced to unwanted suburbs, Sydney drifts on. Utopia has become anywhere and nowhere, the jargon of real estate seduction.
 
Utopia Limited adapts the Biennale of Sydney’s ‘Zones of Contact’ theme to question its host city, a place where lifestyle is pathological and the charm of the surface rests on uneasy exclusions. These artists engage with the notion of urban landscape as historic archive. A politics of landscape based on entry or exclusion is brought home.
 
Fiona MacDonald works with unstable hybrid forms and double-takes. Her woven aerial image of an exclusive enclave dramatically reveals the head of a Wandjina spirit formed by the geometry of blue pools and speedboat launch ramps. The James Cook Island construct is in Sutherland Shire which is also home to last Christmas’s ‘Cronulla beach riot’.
 
Sue Pedley’s ongoing ‘portrait of a people’ photographic gallery reveals a plastic and ambiguous social body. Her neighbours in Ada, Clara and Ethel Streets Erskineville wear a traditional symbol, Syd Nolan’s Ned Kelly mask (here rudely made from a bucket), which also reads as a burqua covering.
 
Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s opus The Elephant and the Journey (2005) is a quest for a city’s true nature. The artist walks the suburbs collating details of Federation architecture and its Arcadian landscape settings. The ambiguity of the painting installation lies in the marvelous use of Thai high religious painting to contemplate everyday notions of public and private space. Doorways become thresholds announcing strangers.
 
Deborah Vaughan’s work Island (2003-05) turns suburban utopia on its head, taking the name Villawood - a combination of villa and wood - to represent an educational institution mutating into a militaristic facility. New zones of ‘no contact’ come into being and, quick as a wink, post-war welcome becomes Cold War detention.
 

Phaptawan Suwannakudt,
The Elephant and the Journey, 2005. Detail.
Full work is eight canvases and three perspex panels, 250 x 500 cm.