Anna Kristensen, Indian Chamber (2011), oil on curved ply, 2.6m height, 11m circumference, 3.66m diameter, Photo: Silversalt photography. Images courtesy of the artist and Gallery 9.   As I stood inside a cylinder, around me, eleven, one-metre plywood panels composed a 360-degree panoramic oil painting of the Jenolan Caves’ Indian Chamber. The rock room was …

Seduction and automotive wanderlust are at the heart of Picnic at Fanging Rock, the debut solo exhibition by Perth-based artist Casey Ayres. The modern automobile is a markedly humanlike device. It falls apart if you neglect it, and is likewise wrecked if it collides with anything. It is the cars ability to respond to care …

Jonathan Hochman with Justin Miles, Don’t Get Too Close (to my fantasy) (2004), C-type photograph I have been thinking endlessly about an astrophysicist named Dan Bauer, a convenient situation in that Bauer too has charted an endless course. He’s looking for Dark Matter two miles beneath Minnesota farming land. He’s down there because in a normal …

Leo Coyte Exhaust (Installation view) (2011) Encountering Leo Coyte’s Exhaust (fittingly staged at db project, a residential space in Sydney’s inner-east) was like walking into the final hours of a messed-up house party. Among the balloons and streamers, bright colours and polka dots, a few worse-for-wear stragglers flanked the walls, eyeing off the beer in my hand …

Rachel Feery, Dream of Pictures [installation view] (2011), dual video projection on frosted acrylic, sound by Ed Gould. Photo- Janelle Low ‘Art can be a magic that excites the magical propensities of those who enjoy it.’1 In that the fantasy world of the artist can communicate and inspire the fantasy world of the viewer. Some artists can …

Pia van Gelder, AV Bells (2011), Hacked media-machines, found objects, electronics, cathode ray TVs, mercury, dimensions variable. Photo: Sarah Mosca Pia van Gelder performs alongside a growing arsenal of mediated machines where her small, nuanced experiments can have loud and potentially dangerous outcomes. Three recent examples are Signeauxß (2010), where she strung the guts of four DVD …

Simon Yates, Futura (2001) Simon Yates shares his name with the mountaineer who famously plummeted through an icy crevasse and survived. That particular Simon endured a solitary struggle to hold onto life, trailing various broken body parts, and subsequently made quite a bit of money by telling his story through the biopic, Touching The Void (2005). It …

The built environment was designed by architect Ryue Nishizawa. Photo: Mahmmut Ceylan   Any biennial with the name ‘Untitled’ set in Times New Roman is clearly bent on neutrality. However, neutrality doesn’t necessarily equal ambivalence. If anything, the 12th Istanbul Biennial has a more pointed sense of a curatorial idea than many similar large events …

Nervous Systems (Alice Lang and Rachael Haynes), Unworkable Action (2011), mixed media installation, dimensions variable   The feeling will pass … was the keynote exhibition of the recently held We Are Here Artist Run Initiative (ARI) symposium organised by Sydney-based arts institutions, National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) and Firstdraft. The exhibition itself was …