Archive

In the 2003 Biennale Australian pavilion, Patricia Piccinini (‘We are family’) entered into the flesh and spirit of the event by seeking to plumb ‘normality’; she goes on the consider ‘What is family?’ A half-understood image of the human genome…

One of the stranger but understandable results of the Iraq War has been the failure of Chris Ofili – the favourite in the stakes – to win the Golden Lion at Venice. No, it was not the absence of a…

In the Dutch pavilion, ‘We are the world’ is the title of a ‘confrontational juxtaposition of installations by five artists of different cultural origins, but all living and working in the Netherlands’. Thus, Mexican Carlos Amorales shows a small shoe…

In July, popular London Mayor Ken Livingston will unveil the most significant revision of Trafalgar Square since the Lutyens fountains were installed in 1939. Our Ken had the right idea, since the new setting for the National Gallery transforms Wilkins…

In the Danish national pavilion, Olafur Eliasson (‘The Blind Pavilion’) provides a welcome series of optical variations that are polarised in orange light using kaleidoscopes and a multi-faceted array internally. If this offers a foretaste of the artist’s repertoire in…

The combination of looted heritage from Afghanistan with that from Baghdad has suddenly created a buyer’s market, with an evident surplus of works. There has been no useful analysis as yet about the trade routes for this spread of relics,…

Absolutely vital for survival; or how vodka in Venice is ‘absolutely’ best paired with tonic