Installation Contemporary
Installation Contemporary is designed to showcase works that extend beyond the traditional booth presentation, providing an opportunity to experience innovative and interactive installations within the unique architecture of Carriageworks. Twelve major artworks were presented for Installation Contemporary 2024, curated by Talia Linz, Senior Curator at Artspace.
“From Carriageworks’ roof to various thresholds and passageways, Installation Contemporary invites artists to move beyond the confines of the traditional fair booth,” says 2024 curator Talia Linz, “enabling them to experiment with scale, to respond directly to the unique setting, and to create innovative works for visitors to discover.”
APY Art Centre Collective
Kulata, Miru, Tjara, 2024
Presented by APY Gallery
Senior men and women from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands present the latest in their Kulata Tjuta (many spears) project, which shares the skills of spear-making across generations. Consisting of 250 Anangu tools and weaponry suspended from the Carriageworks ceiling, Kulata, miru, Tjara is a major new installation rooted in age-old traditions.
Rebecca Baumann
Refracted field, 2024
Presented by MOORE CONTEMPORARY
Rebecca Baumann’s deceptively humble works contribute to a rich legacy of artistic practice invested in the formal components of artmaking. Combining research in psychology and sociology with art history and colour theory, she plays with the properties of light, colour, space and time to explore their experiential and emotive potential. A site-specific work for Installation Contemporary, Refracted Field is constantly changing, affected by atmospheric conditions and each viewer’s movement as we walk past.
Stephen Bird
Continent of Exiles, 2024
Presented by OLSEN
Cybele Cox
Carnival of Fools, 2016-19
Presented by Ames Yavuz
Cybele Cox’s installation Carnival of Fools draws on the rich histories of the feminist, fantastical and grotesque, inviting visitors into its orbit as they pass through the doors of Sydney Contemporary. Cox’s hand-built ceramics are hybrids of the human, animal and mythical, exaggerating characteristics including heads, mouths, tails and breasts. These composite creatures reference classical sculpture while calling for what the artist terms a ‘re-flowering of the spiritual’.
Yeo Kaa
Takits, 2022
Presented by Ames Yavuz
Takits depicts Yeo Kaa’s iconic figure waving hello or goodbye, capturing an ephemeral gesture of encounter. Playing on the Tagalog slang kita-kits – See you later! – Takits belongs to a body of work that takes its cue from mass transportation and the familiar sights of union and separation witnessed on our daily commutes. In a broader sense, the work speaks to our navigation through the literal and allegorical temporary journey of life, marked by transience and the inevitability of passage to another place.
David McDiarmid
All I Want Is A Little More Than I’ll Ever Get from Rainbow Aphorisms, 1994
Presented by Neon Parc and the David McDiarmid Estate
These large-scale text works are part of a series titled Rainbow Aphorisms by artist, designer and activist David McDiarmid, who died from an AIDS-related illness in 1995 when he was just 42. They appropriate sensationalist tabloid headlines and New York subway graffiti during the height of the AIDS epidemic, with a darkly humorous bent that defines much of McDiarmid’s practice. Rainbow Aphorisms were created in Sydney in the final years of the artist’s life and their insightful play with the power of words, the role of media and the concept of truth remain relevant today.
Mai Nguyen-Long
Vomit Girl Project, 2017 – ongoing
Presented by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin
This presentation of Mai Nguyễn-Long’s The Vomit Girl Project collides inspiration from cultural artefacts and personal family history to represent diasporic narratives. The work encompasses a selection of clay characters inspired by đình wood carvings and a Vietnamese rural aesthetic known as mộc mạc. This project is a way for the artist to unpack her conflicted relationship with her Vietnamese heritage, and is connected to notions of resistance, belonging and self-determination. Fluid associations, playful and unorthodox expressions of Buddhism inform her clay-building method.
Patricia Piccinini
The Cloudgazer, 2024
Sensuous Gyre, 2024
Shoeform (Tresses), 2019
Presented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
Patricia Piccinini is renowned for her work that blurs the lines between the natural and artificial, human and animal, creating chimeras that appear so realistic as to be conceivably alive. She is interested in unpicking the distinction human animals have shored up between ourselves and the rest of the living world, a falsehood that has resulted in the current state of climate emergency. For Installation Contemporary she presents an intimate ecosystem, with two smaller sculptures in conversation with a constantly moving corona of hair.
Lisa Roet
Skywalker Gibbon, 2018
Presented by Gow Langsford
For over three decades, Lisa Roet’s practice has been motivated by the question of what it is to be human and our environmental and ethical responsibilities within an increasingly urbanised society. Her 9-metre tall, 20-metre wide Skywalker Gibbon has perched on a Beijing skyscraper and a church façade in Edinburgh, and now lands on the roof of Carriageworks. He emerged from Roet’s research into recently discovered species in China’s Yunnan Province, uncovered due to deforestation. The work is accompanied by the male gibbon love call singing out over the neighbouring rooftops, looking for love during Sydney Contemporary.
Darren Sylvester
Transformer, 2021
Presented by Neon Parc
Buzzing with 40 metres of blue neon, Darren Sylvester’s sleek, steel archway, Transformer, beckons visitors to pass through it. It is an archetypal gateway, a trans-dimensional portal from the set of a sci-fi film that looks as if it could deliver the transformation of its title. Of course, Transformer is a prop, with the suggestion of power and the reality of none. As is emblematic of Sylvester’s works, its polished exterior belies existential yearnings, desires and potentialities.
Shan Turner-Carroll
Bodies On A Rock, 2016-20
Presented by COMA
Shan Turner-Carroll has developed a site-specific response to the unique heritage architecture of Carriageworks, creating an environment – prehistoric, or perhaps post-apocalyptic – for visitors to move through. He merges the real and the simulacra, the natural and the mechanical, in a deliberate attempt to erode these binaries. Glimpses of the human and, in particular, the body, are evident throughout; indeed it is our embodied relationship to nature that the artist is interested in teasing out.
Lu Yang
DOKU the Flow, 2024
Presented by COMA
DOKU The Flow is a new feature-length film by Shanghai-born multimedia artist Lu Yang. It is the second chapter in the artist’s ongoing DOKU series, whose title derives from the phrase ‘Dokusho Dokushi’ – we are born alone, and we die alone – found in canonical Buddhist scripture. Lu Yang belongs to a young art scene in China inspired by science fiction, manga, gaming and techno culture that work with hypermodern technologies to explore ideas of the posthuman.
Meet The Curator: Talia Linz
Talia Linz is a curator and writer, and currently Senior Curator at Artspace, Gadigal Country/Sydney, collaborating on an ambitious program of exhibitions, co-commissions, publishing, and multi-platform projects. She has curated and jointly developed many projects by major international and Australian artists presented at institutions including the Biennale of Sydney, Sydney Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks, Museum of Sydney, National Art School, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh. She has worked throughout the arts in performance, radio and publishing, and has edited and contributed to numerous artist monographs, journals, books and exhibition catalogues. She was a co-curator of rīvus, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, 2022.
