Sorry for the delay in my follow up to Opening Week - after running around like a crazy person for 10 days, I got tonsillitis so have been trying to recover (oh, and write 3 essays....)!
Opening Week: around 10 days of madness! Meeting artists, parties, jumping on and off ferries, artist performances, artist talks, forums... Such an incredible experience! I think around 120 artists/curators came into Sydney for the week from all over the world, so for me, it was enough to just be in the same space as all of these amazingly talented people and hear their take on the world!
One of the highlights was the Opening Week Forum. Day 2 included discussions on Indigenous issues in the arts, with speakers from New Zealand, Canada and Mexico; a panel of curators that included David Elliot, James Putnam (a curator at the British Museum), David A. Bailey (from the International Curators Forum), Simon Njami (from Paris) and Hu Fang (Vitamin Creative Space). Listening to them bounce ideas off each other was really inspiring. Not necessarily to be a curator, but to have that passion about what you do. Then there was the Nick Waterlow Memorial Lecture given by Lawrence Weschler, another inspiring speaker. His discussion on Vermeer, the Dutch wars in the 1660s and the Bosnian-Serbian conflict in the 1990s was really powerful - when they make the taping available, it is definitely worth watching!
Having survived the dramas, the exhibition is now up and running. If you decide to head out to Cockatoo Island, you may just run into me giving free guided tours!
Do tell what the party wa like. I went to one a couple of years ago and it was a very lavish and mega crowded affair!
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