Australian Pavillion
56th Venice Biennale 2015

Fiona Hall

Wrong Way Time

Curator: Linda Michael

Fiona Hall AO will represent Australia at the 56th Venice Biennale with Wrong Way Time, an installation that brings together hundreds of multi-part works from this renowned artist’s prolific practice.

The artist’s love of nature and with things ‘counter and strange’, coupled with an eye for the foibles of human nature, will underlie this multi-layered examination of three intersecting concerns: global politics, finances and the environment. In common with many of us, Hall sees in these failed states ‘a minefield of madness, badness, sadness, in equal measure’, stretching beyond the foreseeable future.

“Wrong Way Time will be a rich, archaeological display that imagines and embodies some of the issues and fluctuations of our time,” says curator Linda Michael. “Though Hall responds to the perilous state of the environment or shared anxieties about the future, her exhibition will be life-affirming, its own vitality in perverse distinction to the subjects it ranges across.”

Wrong Way Time will be the first exhibition to be held in Australia’s new pavilion, designed by architecture firm Denton Corker Marshall.  Funded primarily through donations from private benefactors, in addition to a contribution of $1 million from the Australian Government through the Australia Council, the pavilion is currently under construction and is the first twenty-first century pavilion to be built within the Biennale’s historic Giardini precinct.

“The combination of the new Australian Pavilion, which is well advanced, and Fiona Hall’s ambitious exhibition, will mean 2015 will be a very important year for Australia at the Venice Biennale.  I’ve no doubt that our presence will attract global attention. Australia will be the must-see pavilion,” says Simon Mordant AM, Commissioner for Australia, Venice Biennale 2015.

Fiona Hall: Wrong Way Time and the new Australian Pavilion will be launched in early May 2015, during the opening preview days of this, the most prestigious biennale on the international contemporary arts calendar.

Image: Fiona Hall, Courtesy Australia Council