Another brick in the wall

Ok, in the end we did see a compelling work in the Sydney Biennale. It was such a simple set-up: a couple of screens set at right angles showing text with some heart pounding sound. It turned out that the words were transcribed from a police interview so one side showed the words of the police interviewer and the other those of the suspected murderer. The slow revelation of desperation, uncertainty and collapse was astonishing in this dance of manipulation.  The artist was Ignas Krunglevicius from Lithuania who was in fact trained as a composer. This perhaps helps explain the work's chilling sensitivity to sub-text.

And there was more. After peering across a long brick wall to locate a set of minute Matt Hinkley works, another brick wall came as no surprise until with a big smack in the side of the head we saw it was ripped. Now that was one of the big visual surprises of the Biennale. It turned out we were looking at a ‘brick’ wall that had been constructed and painted as part of the set for X-Men Origins: Wolverine that was filmed on Cockatoo Island in 2008.

Images: top, Interrogation by Ignas Krunglevicius. Second row searching for Matt Hinkley and bottom, the Wolverine wall.