TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation

Curators: Victoria Lynn and Helen Hughes/Discipline

TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation is co-curated by TarraWarra Director, Victoria Lynn, and co-founder of contemporary art journal Discipline, Helen Hughes. The collaboration takes as its starting point the shared structuring principles of biennial exhibitions and periodical publications. It brings together over 20 new artworks by contemporary Australian artists around the themes of making-public, iteration or edition, and circulation.

The curatorial team comments: “Both biennials and journals take the form of an edition. They are continuous, one edition after another, but punctuated by pauses. As well as being additive or iterative, biennials and journals produce contrasting modes of circulation. Where biennials typically bring artists and artworks from all around the world to one place for a designated period of time (a centripetal movement), journals disperse—they move away from their site of origin through postal systems, emails and downloads (a centrifugal movement).”

Entitled Endless Circulation, the TarraWarra Biennial and Discipline will be presented as intertwined platforms, bringing together a range of works that explore continuity by bringing their past and future into the same frame, as well as projects that are predicated on their circulation outside the parameters of traditional art spaces.

Many works featured in the exhibition use these methods to unveil aspects of Australia’s colonial history and its persistence in the present; others reveal the social, economic and political histories of their own making, or attempt to anticipate their future trajectories—travelling through the marketplace, gradually adapting to new contexts, or degrading over time.

The participating artists include 3-ply x Centre for Style, Monica’s Gallery, Jessie Kiely / Vernon Ah Kee / Robert Andrew / Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley / Susan Cohn / Sarah crowEST / Saskia Doherty / Debris Facility / Alicia Frankovich / Newell Harry / Bianca Hester / Biljana Jancic / Helen Johnson / Julia McInerney / Vincent Namatjira / Ryan Presley / Eugenia Raskopoulos / Masato Takasaka / James Tylor / Wrong Solo (Brian Fuata and Agatha Gothe-Snape) / Wukun Wanambi / 4th/5th Melbourne Artist Facilitated Biennial (Christopher L G Hill, Nick Selenitsch, Lou Hubbard, Lewis Fidock, Endless Lonely Planet, Liam Osborne, Lisa Radford, Elizabeth Newman, Nicholas Tammens, Kate Meakin, George Egerton-Warburton, James Deutsher, Zac Segbedzi, Aurelia Guo, Rudi Williams, Alex Vivian, Lucina Lane, Lauren Burrow, Counterfeitnessfirst, Virginia Overell, Joshua Petherick, Laurel Doody, Tahi Moore, elp3 Vine, and more…)

Inaugurated in 2006 to identify new developments in contemporary art practice, the TarraWarra Biennial invites artists to present new work at the unique TarraWarra Museum of Art, located in the spectacular Yarra Valley one hour from Melbourne. The Biennial highlights pivotal aspects of Australian practice under an experimental curatorial platform.

Public program
The Biennial/Discipline collaboration will present performances and talks by participating artists at the Museum on Friday, August 19 and Saturday, August 20.

From August 23 to October 29, 2016. TarraWarra Museum of Art in association with Discipline and Gertrude Contemporary presents the TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation lecture series at various venues in Melbourne, including Gertrude Contemporary, the National Gallery of Victoria, TarraWarra Museum of Art and Blak Dot Gallery.

Charles Green will speak on biennales, triennales and Documenta; Chari Larsson will speak on Steve McQueen’s recent postage stamp project, Queen and Country (2007-09); Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks will give a combined lecture-performance on the circulatory form of gossip as a disruptive/interruptive speech act; Chris McAuliffe will compare meme culture with 1960s and 1970s Conceptual art projects in which artists self-consciously occupied circulatory systems; Tina Baum will speak about the past and future of Australia’s National Indigenous Art Triennial; and Léuli Eshraghi will discuss the pressures of First Nations curators operating in Eurocentric museums and settler-colonial states.

This lecture series will result in a special issue of Discipline to be published November 2016.

For further information and images:
Katrina Raymond, MediaLink Productions
T +613 9663 3222 / katrina [​at​] medialinkproductions.com