Overview
We love it when art takes over the city, and the the Biennale of Sydney does it better than anyone else. The city-wide art event is back for its 21st iteration, this time presenting works by 70 leading local and international artists across seven of Sydney's top-notch galleries, museums and unconventional spaces.
This year, provocative Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is the headline act, and he's installed a a 60-metre-long inflatable boat on Sydney's Cockatoo Island. Law of the Journey is big, black and imposing — it's made from the same materials as the boats used to build the refugee vessels that travel from Turkey to Greece on the Aegean Sea. It's also filled with 300 oversized figures, making it a confronting and thought-provoking work. It premiered at Prague's National Gallery a year ago, and will be on display until the Biennale wraps up on June 11.
Weiwei is currently in Sydney too, and will screen his new feature-length cinematic documentary Human Flow, which explores the global refugee crisis across 23 countries in a single year, at the Opera House on Thursday, March 15. His appearance comes off the back of his 2016 double-bill exhibition alongside the works of Andy Warhol at the National Gallery of Victoria — the highest selling event in the gallery's history.
The 21st Biennale of Sydney runs across Sydney from March 16 until June 11. For ideas on how to tackle it, visit our guides: from 4a to Carriageworks, from the Opera House to Artspace, and from the MCA to Cockatoo Island.
Images: Letícia Almeida.
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