Mami Kataoka; Photo credit Daniel Boud
Reaching your 21st birthday is about a coming of age – it salutes the next chapter of your life. The same could be said of the 2018 Biennale of Sydney (BoS) in the hands of Japanese curator Mami Kataoka, who plans to turn to the past to understand whether this exhibition continues to be valid for the future.
The celebrated Chief Curator at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum (MAM), Kataoka is the first Artistic Director to come from Asia since the biennale’s inception in 1973.
Most would agree that the decision is long overdue and is a step in addressing the Eurocentric vision of the past 44 years, by the time she delivers her show.
Kataoka told ArtsHub in an exclusive interview: ‘A lot of people I know, including David Elliot who was my former boss (and Director 2010 Biennale of Sydney), were very England or Euro related. I have been thinking for some time that somebody from the region should be Artistic Director for Sydney Biennale – it didn’t have to be me, but I am thrilled that it is.’
She continued: ‘I feel really lucky to have this number 21. Twenty editions is like a whole set – done. I want to witness the change of the biennale,’ she continued.
It was a sentiment echoed by Chief Executive Officer BoS, Ben Strout: ‘It is time to think about the biennale and what’s next, where we should be going forward.’
Kataoka is also the sixth female Artistic Director to take the reigns of the international exhibition; Lynne Cooke was the first in 1996 following a run of nine male curators.
Are biennales still valid?
It is not the question you expect an incoming Artistic Director to be asking, but it sits core to Mami Kataoka’s plans for Sydney – to return to history to ask what has been valid and valuable, and whether the exhibition continues to hold a place in our changed world.
The Biennale of Sydney has faced great tensions and changes in recent years, with the artist boycott of founding sponsor Transfield Holdings in 2014; a change of headquarters, new CEO, primary sponsor and partner venues in 2016; and the announcement of rival event The National (a biennale style event across the partner venues of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW and Carriageworks) earlier this year in Sydney, redefinition is indeed timely.
Kataoka explained: ‘When I was a young student there were three important biennales – Venice, Sao Paulo and Sydney. It has been quite talked about in Japan and I am very interested in the entire history surrounding biennales.
‘When Sydney Biennale started in ‘73 that was the only way of looking at the international trends in this part of the world – it was so important and so exciting – but now the vast number of art events in Asia and institutions in this region make it a good time to reconsider what the role of biennale is for the City of Sydney and for the region.’
Kataoka also recognised that the public themselves are more fluid – quicker to jump on a plane to Southeast Asia than London these days – and noting that the whole register of comparative views and histories has shifted.
This methodology is not a first for Kataoka. Her work as Co-Artistic Director of ROUNDTABLE: THE 9th Gwangju Biennale (Korea, 2012) did exactly that. Key to its premise was recognizing the temporary and circulatory nature of biennales and to confront how we can find our own temporal positioning and connectedness through them.
Keeping it personal
‘When you try to make a biennale today you can look at the entire list of the artists through the Internet – the Google biennale,’ laughed Kataoka, ‘But that is very uninteresting.
‘Everyone can understand an artist’s practice through images or Instagram as a superficial understanding that is why I am more interesting in depth – and one of the reasons that I have been working on major solo exhibitions of Asian artists in past years,’ she continued.
‘What is happening now globally is every region, every place has an interesting group of artists but they are just not known so this personal connection is very important. It is extremely important for me to come and visit the artists and experience everything that is surrounding them – food, social political context, location, everything.’
Kataoka said she was especially interesting in looking at where Australia’s immigrants have come from and to draw connections with those histories and the exhibition also.
Rock stars versus local dialogue
Kataoka has been Chief Curator at MAM since 2003, where she has curated major survey exhibitions by artists who could be described as the ‘rock stars of Asian art’ – Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Ai Weiwei, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lee Bul, Lee Mingwei and N.S Harsha (coming soon).
Can we expect her to pull on that celebrity bank for Sydney?
Kataoka told ArtsHub: ‘I think it is important to have major pieces by major artists and Sydney has a very specific location to do that with site-specific work. But there are also so many undiscovered good artists that I really would like to use this opportunity to expose them.
‘I will have both – a biennale that has different perspectives woven into one experience,’ she added emphatically.
In a pendulum swing from the macro to the micro, celebrity to the local position, Kataoka will also be looking at the history of audience reaction to the exhibition and contemporary art, and trying to ascertain its current barometer.
‘I am curious to talk to this big local audience of the art community in Sydney. I am sure some of them have seen all the biennales and how they have been seeing the changes. I am interested to explore the city without a biennale or with a biennale – what would be the difference over the course of that 40 years and the general public’s knowledge and experience of contemporary art and how it has been accumulated?’
What we can expect for 2018?
In our conversations with Mami Kataoka she was keen to impress she was at the start of her curatorial journey for Sydney, however she made the following comments that hint at what is to come:
- I am trying to see how I can involved more voices from the local people – a way to engage local communities.
- I am looking at the history of city and the different communities, diversities and multicultural aspects.
- I wanted to look at the diversity of people who are immigrant to Australia and where they are coming from and draw the connections to those places in the work.
- I enjoyed Charles Merewether’s biennale in 2008, which used a lot of off-site spaces and had you moving though the city.
- I will look at the city in ways so that visitors and residents can rediscover the city.
- I have done quite a lot of research in New Zealand, and I am having a big Southeast Asian show at the Mori next July so I have been travelling quite intensively to ASEAN countries and have good new experiences from the region to inform me.
- I am not intending to go through the entire world.
- The thinking I have at this moment is that art – to me – is always asking questions: Where are going and where are you coming from? So my biennale will ask those larger holistic questions given the accelerated complexities in the world conditions today, rather than just criticize in a superficial way.
No Stranger to Australia
Kataoka is testament to the value in funded international curator programs, which sadly took a grave hit in recent arts funding cuts.
She was one of 13 eminent international advisors to this year’s 20th edition of the Biennale; visited Melbourne’s MPavilion during visit, came earlier to Gertrude in 2010, did a research trip to Charles Mereweather’s 2008 Biennale, and watched closely as friend Jonathan Watkin’s curated the 11th Biennale in 1998.
Strout said: ‘It is fantastic that Mami has seen three biennales and has a knowledge of the others. We have grown to know her a little bit through this last exhibition and the work she did at the AGNSW, including Taro Shinoda’s work.’
Kataoka has been a key figure in documenting and analyzing trends within contemporary Japanese art since 2000. She is currently working on a major exhibition of Southeast Asian art to mark ASEAN’s 50th anniversary, which will open at MAM in July 2017.
Recent important exhibitions include: Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past (2012) at the Asian Art Museum San Francisco, Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs to You Only (2012), the first large-scale solo exhibition at MAM of Asia’s leading female artist, and Ai Weiwei: According to What? (2009), which then toured in 2012 to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC and venues across America.
She has also worked on Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time (2005) in collaboration with Hirshhorn, Tokyo-Berlin / Berlin-Tokyo (2006) in collaboration with the Neue National Galerie in Berlin, Roppongi Crossing: New Visions in Contemporary Japanese Art 2004 at MAM.
Prior to MAM in Tokyo, Mami Kataoka was the International Curator at the Hayward Gallery in London (2007-2009), and Chief Curator at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (1998-2002). She currently serves on the board of CIAMAM, is a member of Guggenheim Museum Asia Art Council and advisory member for Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing.
Dates and venues are yet to be announced for Kataoka’s 2018 Biennale of Sydney.
Her exhibition will follow the very successful 20th Biennale of Sydney: The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed, which had more than 640,000 visitors, the second highest audience on record.
Curated by Artistic Director Dr. Stephanie Rosenthal of London’s Hayward Gallery, it featured more than 200 works by 83 artists hailing from 35 countries, with 70% new commissions. It closed on 5 June 2016.
