Curated by Clothilde Bullen, Anna Davis, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, and Isobel Parker Philip
In 2017, three of Sydney’s major art institutions collaborated to stage the first of three biennial editions of The National, thus beginning to repair an absence in the city of large-scale surveys of Australian contemporary art. The 2019 iteration will showcase new and commissioned works by emerging and established Australian artists based in homeland cities, nonurban regions, and remote Indigenous communities, but also abroad. Sixty-five artists’ works are to be presented in three distinct exhibitions assembled by curators from each institution. At the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Anna Davis and Clothilde Bullen promise a show of diverse cultural representations, attentive to power imbalances, rituals, and improvisation; Art Gallery of New South Wales curator Isobel Parker Philip will bring together works that explore dialectics of chaos and control; and Carriageworks curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham has commissioned and selected exhibits that engage with placemaking and cultural memory.
