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The 16th Biennale of Sydney proposes a greater focus on formal and aesthetic concerns than its more recent predecessors. Its drawing of connections between contemporary and historical works, and its motif of reversals and disruptions, are ideas that Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has explored in her curatiorial practice over the past two decades, most recently as Chief Curator of Castello di Rivoli, Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin. Here she talks to Russell Storer about how her interests and experiences - and frustrations - have shaped her 2008 edition.
 
Russell Storer: For the purposes of this discussion, and to help people get an idea of how you have approached the Biennale of Sydney, I thought a good way to begin would be to get some background about yourself, and how you have developed your curatorial work over time.
 
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: One of the characteristics of being a curator is that I hide behind artists, so to answer a personal question is difficult and unexpected, but I will try! My mother was an archaeologist, and everything I do somehow I owe to her. She would take me with her on digs, more for fun than for any real research purposes.
 
I think my interest in the presentation and experience of culture as something very physical that envelops you, which I suppose is what an exhibition is, goes back to those digs. She also used to take me to cemeteries whenever we would go to a new town, and from reading the tombstones would be able to tell what was happening today in that town. I think that provided me with another characteristic of my work, which is looking backwards as a way of going forwards.
 
Within the contemporary art field I'm rather known as the odd curator who was putting Piero Manzoni and Mark Dion together in the 1990s, or Anri Sala's Mixed behaviour, 2003, with Édouard Manet's Masked ball at the opera, 1873. These constellations of past and present come from that archaeological viewpoint, because an archaeologist becomes an archaeologist to understand the future through the past. So that's a general framework.
 
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RS: You worked initially as an independent curator, and then moved into an institution, New York's P.S.1 in the late 1990s. Tell me about that development, and how it shifted your working methods, if at all.
 
CC-B: My first work as an independent curator was in Rome, and my first exhibition, in 1987, was called 'Non In Codice'. Dan Graham secretly curated it as he picked all the artists, and Sol LeWitt secretly designed the catalogue cover.
 
The reason I mention it is that it was made very closely with the artists, and it was not institutional. It was in the gardens of the American Academy in Rome and at the Galleria Pieroni, which was an important avant-garde gallery where I actually met artists, sitting on the sofa.
 
I learned a lot from those direct conversations, and this project gives you an idea of my curatorial practice. Curatorial schools didn't exist at the time. I think I was in the last generation of the independent curators that had started working in the late 1960s, like Harald Szeemann, just before the field became the professionalised one it is today, which I find a problematic situation.
 
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My first show at P.S.1 was the first edition of 'Greater New York' in 2000. I was brought to New York by Alanna Heiss, who taught me one of the most important things: people forget what you did wrong, and they remember what you did. That's a very liberating lesson to learn, and it gives you a lot of freedom to act and courage to take risks.
 
This was a moment when Eurocentric art was being questioned and there was a critique of anything western, so I thought I'd do a show of young New York-based artists. This shifted the attitude in New York City from an attitude of depression, when people were thinking that nothing was happening - everything was happening somewhere else, like China - to a situation where there was awareness of a network of artists, ranging from Rachel Harrison to John Pilson; young artists who are now very topical. Of course 50% of the artists in 'Greater New York' were from elsewhere; from Africa, Asia, Europe, even Australia. People move all over the world and you find the centre in the periphery and the periphery in the centre and so forth.
 
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RS: Your first biennale/triennale was Turin in 2005/2006, titled 'The Pantagruel Syndrome', which attempted to question the proliferation of biennales throughout the world as a form of 'gigantism' and excess.
 
CC-B: The region of Torino wanted to set up a triennale, initially with local curators, so that meant Francesco Bonami from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation and myself. It's difficult to criticise the biennale proliferation in a place where there never has been a biennale, so doing a project that was critical of the proliferation was not a good choice in that context. But the choice to ironically repeat the illness, like a virus, was a good one. It also was an honest decision to give the artists the option to actually address that with their works - because Pantagruel [the creation of sixteenth-century writer François Rabelais] is this really fat giant who eats too much and occasionally gets sick, a syndrome very close to our society.
 
What I don't like about a lot of biennales is that they hide the fact that - whether or not they are critical of the society that we live in - the model that is used for that critique is mimicking the same thing that it is supposed to critique, which is the shopping mall. I find that hypocritical, and the only thing I could do was this inoculation of the virus.
 
RS: Did this self-reflexive curatorial method, and your experience of working on that exhibition, affect the way you have approached the Biennale of Sydney?
 
CC-B: I think Sydney is very different; I approach it in a very different way. Sydney is one of the oldest biennales - it's the first of the young ones, and the last of the old ones, so it's in a funny kind of double bind. It can play both roles and has the contradictions of each, being the beginning of the decentralisation of the art world in 1973, which accelerates enormously in the 1990s and 2000s, and being also the last of these great heroic moments of the international avant-garde coming together to talk about art and politics, together with São Paulo, documenta and Venice: you've got René Block planting Joseph Beuys tree outside of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1979. That's the context of doubleness that I'm in, that I have to navigate.
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2008 issue.