Expanding your mind with the 17th Biennale

On an unusually warm winter's day, with not a cloud in the sky, we headed over to visit the 17th Biennale of Sydney on Cockatoo Island.

Every year, the Biennale celebrates Australian and international contemporary artists during a three month festival extravaganza in Sydney. Amongst other venues, the main highlights are found at the Museum of Contemporary Art and huge installations within the historic buildings and stunning backdrop of Cockatoo Island.

This year, the festival is themed: The beauty of distance - Songs of survival in a precarious age. For it is our distance from the rest of the world that allows us to be ourselves  - displaying our differences within our common similarities - making us "according to the circumstances – beautiful, terrifying, attractive, boring, sexy, unsettling, fascinating, challenging, funny, stimulating, horrific or even many of these at once."

Walking around Cockatoo Island awakened every sensory gland. Steeped in history, it was the perfect canvas for contemporary sculptures, videos, paintings, photographs. The old buildings,  mining tunnels, and warehouses alighted your sense of smell with damp rock, wharping wood, old grease, sawdust, even cool nothingness.

All of a sudden you are tempted into a room with an old posh voice overshadowed by a piano eerily hanging mid-air playing, as if, by a ghost of Cockatoo Island.

Tickling your spine.

Other installations are less eerie, and are instead spectacular. Take for instance, "Inopportune: Stage One" - a series of nine cars seemingly exploding at various stages of performing a somersault, cleverly inspiring your imagination to conjur the arresting visual effect of a car exploding. In reality, the installation is  in a static environment, but you see if you can get your brain to stop making the links as if it actually happening in motion!

That this festival could possibly be free is something that we should not take for granted. From the hundreds of volunteers who give us  their time, the sponsors who  help pay for the exhibitions, the government funded spaces (Cockatoo Island / MCA / NSW Art Gallery etc)  must all be thanked in giving us the opportunity to see this incredible contemporary art extravaganza. This is why we are Australian. This is why being so geographically isolated from the rest of the world, the beauty of our distance, makes us so generous - our good old Aussie spirit!

How to get to Cockatoo Island: Free ferry from Wharf 2/3 Walsh Bay or Circular Quay (MCA side) every hour Mon - Fri or Every half hour on weekends. Download the full timetable here.

To camp at Cockatoo Island, book now!

Avoid missing out! 17th Biennale runs until 1st August 2010.