John Kaldor, founder of Sydney-based nonprofit organization Kaldor Public Art Projects (KPAP), announced last week in Sydney that young Indigenous Australian artist Jonathan Jones had won the open competition to create a site-specific work celebrating KPAP’s 45th anniversary, slated to take place in 2016.

Now in its 25th year, the Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) was still eager to shake off the perception that it is a somewhat dowdy old lady. Even Barry Keldoulis, CEO of Art Fairs Australia, which now manages the event, was circumspect when talking about the new performance art and emerging artists programs that was tucked upstairs on the fair’s mezzanine level. He later confessed to ArtAsiaPacific of the need to tread wearily when dealing with the current owners of the fair, the Melbourne Art Foundation. “We have adopted a collegiate approach,” he said.

Installations seem to grow ever more bloated in size in direct correlation to the thinness of a work’s conceptual framework. Paris-based artist Christian Boltanski’s Chance (2011), which was installed at Sydney’s Carriageworks up until last month as part of this year’s Sydney Festival, is no exception. Filling the length of the inner-city art space’s foyer, 16 tons of special scaffolding ran a continuous loop of 400 baby photographs, culled from the birth announcements of Polish newspapers, printed on reams of paper, reminiscent of a newspaper printing press. Occasionally a bell sounded and the whole process would grind to a temporary halt, only to start again with a second sounding of the bell.

Controversy has dogged the lead up to the opening of the 19th Biennale of Sydney (BoS), You Imagine What You Desire, with 9 artists pulling out pre-launch and over half of the exhibitors signing an open letter of protest to the biennale’s board over links between the event’s major sponsor Transfield, and off-shore asylum seeker detention centers.

Whether Tino Sehgal’s performance pieces are high art or pretentious nonsense hardly matters. Last week at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, audiences were enrapt as the Berlin-based artist’s team of performers sang and danced into existence his 2005 work This is so contemporary in the vestibule of the gallery.

Chinese artist, Cai Guo-Qiang has been making his signature gunpowder works for over twenty years. In 2008, he was commissioned to create Footprints in the Sky (2008), a dazzling firework arrangement that traversed the Beijing sky during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.  

There is nothing frivolous about Juliana Engberg—artistic director of the 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire (BoS)—you get what you see. She is likeable, vivacious, entertaining and quick to laugh but is susceptible, she confesses, to “a bit of intellectualism.”  Her background is of Danish ancestry and perhaps this heritage has dictated the biennale’s focus, which this year is strongly influenced by a Nordic and European sensibility. There are 36 artists from Scandinavia and countries such as Lithuania and Poland and several from Northern Europe, France, Germany and Holland, for example.