Biennale of Sydney: The 'in-between' spaces

Just two works in the Biennale of Sydney tackled the global refugee crisis head on – and the most striking (not visually but conceptually) was Murillo's 'art of omission'. Instead of presenting the work he'd planned, the Colombian-born London-based artist flushed his passport down the plane's toilet while he was in transit to Sydney. Consequently, when he landed in Sydney he was deported.

In a statement released by the artist, he said: “Destroying my passport was a way of challenging the conditions in which I have the privilege of moving through the world, as a citizen.” You can read more about the incident in the New York Times.

You can see a trace of Murillo's work-to-be in this between-building gap on Abercrombie Street: a series of medical autopsy tables stacked on top of one another, with black canvas stretched over the top. 

You can also find a book and a sound installation in the ticket office at the Embassy of Transition, Mortuary Station.

More often a painter, Indigenous artist Daniel Boyd has replicated his trademark 'dots' with tiny reflective mirrors, on the 'Redfern Wall'.

You can see a suite of other works by Boyd at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Biennale exhibition.

Brazilian artist Ricardo Basbaum created one of his trademark diagrams in large, bill-board scale. The Biennale's statement about the work reads: "In it, or through it, Basbaum advances his bioconceptualism to propose to Sydney passersby a poetic-choreographic cartography for the afterlife of conditioned presence."

We have no idea what this means. But we like it when billboards are not selling us shit, but rather making us curious.

Local collective Brown Council have taken over the former premises of Grantpirrie gallery to continue their ongoing project paying tribute to pioneering Australian performance artist and feminist Barbara Cleveland. 

Join them Sat Jun 4 from 4pm to see the work in action. Pop in on Sat from 10am to check out documentation of the project.

Crawl through a tent tunnel into the patchwork wonderland of Keg de Souza's temporary venue: the Redfern School of Displacement – for discussions of local and global displacement.

Two more of Dane Mitchell's 'Remedy' tanks are at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, as part of their Biennale of Sydney exhibition.