The Floating Eye is the curatorial concept for the
Sydney Pavilion in the Shanghai Bienale, the largest international
art event in mainland China, expected to attract over 8 million visitors. Curated
by 4A’s Director, Aaron Seeto, concept presents
new and existing works from six contemporary Australian artists, Brook Andrew,
Shaun Gladwell, Raquel Ormella, Khaled Sabsabi, Shen Shaomin and Bababa
International.
In a location like Sydney, Australia’s
oldest settler city, with its Aboriginal history, colonisation, waves of mass
migration, shifting economic bases and trade, awareness of the natural
environment, natural disasters there is no single narrative and straightforward
representative space of its history. Sydney’s geography between Asia and the
West results in the constant overlaying of different historical and cultural
contexts. In presenting the personal accounts generated by individual artists,
to mark out the engagements and the discontinuities they experience as they try
to negotiate ideas of locality and culture in globalised context, all of the
artists in The Floating Eye articulates
a specific history of Australia; a feeling of being connected and disconnected
simultaneously.
The exhibition encourages an
observation of a city’s shifting references and influences, how the overlay of
time and history and our emotions and sensations of a place, give meaning and
form to our shared spaces. As such the contemporary artists in The Floating Eye hold
strong connections with Sydney and offer varied perspectives of the city’s
transforming reality observed though its demographics, environment, history,
politics, geography and society.
Together
the artists in The Floating Eye presents a framework to illustrate how
Sydney, and Australia, considers itself within the region and highlights the
layering of histories and diverse social and cultural experiences, which speak
to the experience of individuals living in global cities such as Sydney.
How do we discuss the attributes
and feelings of a certain place? How do we share those sentiments and effects
in a visually meaningful way? In creating a symbols based solution for the Floating Eye, we are
really playing with language. A short hand way of describing the key concepts
of the exhibition, articulating something that might be difficult to do in
words. We are illustrating the interdependence of these key words to a
surrounding attitude or culture, and its effect. The symbols are meaningless
and meaningful at the same time, it is an interdependence of meaning and pure
observation. They become abstractions of the city. Combined, the symbols create
an equation:Thing + State <=>
effect/ transformed state/ an emotion, a state of being with the result
intertwined by an eye – a graphical interpretation of the lens of the viewer.
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