Katarina Matiasek
22nd Biennale of Sydney, Australia
16 June – 6 September 2020
The 22nd Biennale of Sydney, curated by artist Brook Andrew, reopened on 16 June, 2020 after initially shutting down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entitled NIRIN, the Biennial examined unresolved past anxieties and hidden layers of the supernatural that weigh heavily on our contemporary lives. The project aimed at both exposing these conflicts and demonstrating that artists and creatives have the power to imagine a future of transformation for recalibrating the world.
In 2019, Andrew invited Austrian artist Katarina Matiasek to travel to Australia to conduct research for a newly commissioned work for the biennial. Phileas co-commissioned the project, and supported both the research trip in 2019, and the production and exhibition of the resultant work for 2020.
Matiasek’s work questioned the relation between image and reality; it investigated the structural connections between media and perception-based images and the cognitive operations that lead to the construction of our realities. From these interests and from academic research in the field of anthropology, Far From Settled (2020), commissioned for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, centred on the return of an anthropological collection originating in an Austrian expedition to Oceania (1904–1906) to its geographical site. The scenario unfolds before the viewer within a spatial video installation, each one comprised of informal interviews with the communities of origin, carried out on their traditional lands. Projected into an empty, shelf-like display suggestive of the anthropological archive and its current undoing, the camera work aimed to embody the sensation of moving through one connected yet disputed and disturbed terrain. In its attempt to formally rewrite the spatial and political definitions of a landscape through temporal movement, Far From Settled ultimately suggests a renegotiation of persisting boundaries and frontiers.
Katarina Matiasek (born 1965 in Vienna, Austria) is an artist, researcher and curator. She has exhibited her work at such institutions as the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Neue Galerie Graz; Rupertinum, Salzburg and Galerías de la Fonoteca Nacional, Mexico among others. Furthermore, Matiasek is a lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vienna.
