Hidden 2011

Overview

A day and a half into October, near midnight, the people in the Mexican town of Patzcuaro take boats across the lake to the island and talk to the dead by candlelight.  In Madagascar, people traditionally take ancestral bodies from tombs, wrap them in new clothes and dance with them. In Sydney you used to take a special train to Rookwood Necropolis, near Lidcombe station, and have a picnic there among the graves. Nowadays the bus gets you closer and Rookwood's custodians want the cemetery to fill with the living again, as well as the dead. To that end Hidden is on, mixing local artists' sculpture in among the sepulture and gardens of one of the world's largest cities of the dead.

Hidden brings together over thirty artists in the grounds of the cemetery and in the chapel, inviting the public to wander amongst them. It's hard to talk about death, and one of the exhibition's sponsors is a non-profit who would like you to be able to do just that. But if you find you can't, let the art speak for you. Print a map, and get out among it.

Image by mickou.