Daniel Crooks, Lau­ren Brincat
Tar­raWar­ra Bien­ni­al 2021: Slow Mov­ing Waters

The Tar­raWar­ra Bien­ni­al 2021: Slow Mov­ing Waters responds to two relat­ed cues: the idea of slow­ness, and the gen­tle, mea­sured flow of the near­by Bir­rarung (Yarra Riv­er). The exhibition’s title comes from the trans­la­tion of the local Woi­wur­rung word ​‘tar­rawar­ra’, after which the Muse­um, and its sur­round­ing area of Wurund­jeri Coun­try in the Yarra Val­ley are named.

Aligned with the unhur­ried arc of the riv­er, Slow Mov­ing Waters explores process­es of decel­er­a­tion, delay and the decom­pres­sion of time, propos­ing a stay to the ever more rapid flows of peo­ple, com­merce and infor­ma­tion that char­ac­terise the dynam­ic of glob­al­i­sa­tion. Against today’s cult of speed, the art­works in the Bien­ni­al mark a dif­fer­ent sort of time – one which con­nects with the vast­ness and intri­ca­cy of geo­log­i­cal and cos­mo­log­i­cal cycles, sea­son­al rhythms, inter­con­nect­ed ecolo­gies, and ancient knowl­edge systems.

The exhi­bi­tion devel­ops from the idea that between the accel­er­a­tion of our cur­rent age and the impos­si­bil­i­ty of stop­ping alto­geth­er is a tem­po­ral space of pos­si­bil­i­ty and resis­tance: slow­ing down. Through works which unfold con­cep­tu­al­ly, spa­tial­ly, mate­ri­al­ly and tem­po­ral­ly over the course of the exhi­bi­tion, it seeks to height­en our aware­ness to the over­looked sub­tleties of the present.

Con­sid­er­ing the broad­er arc of his­to­ry against the pull of the accel­er­at­ed now, the Tar­raWar­ra Bien­ni­al 2021 advances expan­sive rela­tions to time that are ground­ed in both place and com­mu­ni­ty, atten­tive to an idea of the present as a site of mul­ti­ple dura­tions, pasts and pos­si­ble futures. At a time of untold dis­rup­tion to the tem­pos and struc­tures of con­tem­po­rary life, Slow Mov­ing Waters imag­ines alter­na­tive con­cep­tions of time and how they might offer dif­fer­ent ways of being in the world. Ori­ent­ed around dis­tur­bances to the pre­vail­ing cur­rent, it har­ness­es the poten­tial of slow­ness as both a pas­sive and an active means for claim­ing dif­fer­ent forms of agency, recog­nis­ing that, from with­in the eddies of the riv­er, new net­works of sol­i­dar­i­ty, sup­port and resis­tance can take hold.

Curat­ed by Nina Miall