This two-day forum related to the core elements around which the 17th Biennale of Sydney – The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age – had been built. In it the question is asked: how can aesthetic values in different cultures be paradigmatic of qualities we all can recognise? This was amplified by artists presenting their own work. Moving between the ideas and language or pre-modernity, modernity and now, consider art's positive power and critical role, how this relates to different cutures, and how it has been used as a means of reinforcing or subverting ideas of materialism and property, or, alternatively, as an expression of non-material or metaphysical value.
Friday 14 May
Session I: 10 am Poverty, Freedom and Rights Enrique Chagoya, Amareswar Galla, Leah Gordon, Margaret Levi, Steven Loft
Session II: 1 pm Is It Smart To Be Materialist? Olga Egorova, David Elliott, Gonkar Gyatso, Fred Tomaselli
Session III : 3 pm History, Experience, Truth and Empathy Dana Claxton, Bruce W. Ferguson, Catriona Moore, Fiona Pardington, Teka Selman Read Bruce W. Ferguson's paper
Session IV : 4.30 pm Chto Delat: Tower Songspiel, Olga Egorova (presents a new work)
Saturday 15 May
Session I: 10 am First People, Diaspora and Fourth Worlds Brenda Croft, Claudio Dicochea, Ngahiraka Mason, Kent Monkman
Session II : 1 pm Communities, Commons, Copyright Dr Gerald McMaster, Eileen Simpson & Ben White, Megan Tamati-Quennell
Session III : 2.30 pm Curating What? David A. Bailey MBE, Ekaterina Degot, David Elliott, Hu Fang, Simon Njami, James Putnam, Pier Luigi Tazzi
Session IV : 4.30 pm Nick Waterlow Memorial Lecture: Serenity And Terror In Vermeer, and After Lawrence Weschler
The 17th Biennale of Sydney Forum is organised in collaboration with the International Curators Forum; the University of Technology, Sydney; the United States Studies Centre; and the Faculty of Arts and The Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, The University of Sydney.
