Australian artists must shuck restrictive mentality and own global potential

Nina Miall, the guest curator of this year’s TarraWarra Biennial, is on a mission to dissolve the ‘strange’ distinction between Australian and international art.

‘Australian artists must think of themselves as participating on the world stage,’ says TarraWarra Biennial curator Nina Miall. Picture: Aaron Francis

One of the nation’s most respected curators has said labelling ­locally created art “Australian” or “international” is a “restrictive mentality” preventing artists from taking their places on the world stage.

Nina Miall, appointed curator of international art at Brisbane’s modern art museum QAGOMA, said the “strange and arbitrary distinction” that applies “Australian” to art must be broken down.

“There’s this idea here that Australian art isn’t international art. It’s quite a restrictive mentality because it doesn’t encourage Australian artists to think of themselves as participating on the world stage”, said Miall, who is also guest curator of the seventh TarraWarra Biennial, a major exhibition of contemporary Australian art opening at TarraWarra Museum in Victoria this weekend.

The cutting edge museum in Healesville, an hours’ drive from Melbourne, will bring together multidisciplinary works by 25 Australian artists, many commissioned especially for the show, Slow Moving Waters.

“I had originally devised the show to bring Australian and international artists in dialogue together,” Miall said. A mix of COVID restrictions, the biennial’s format as a “national survey” and her keen interest in site-specific art meant the exhibition evolved to feature an all-Australian line-up. Interrogating the invisible barrier between local and overseas art is something the curator is passionate about pursuing in ­future exhibitions.

“I still think there’s a really interesting show to be had there,” said Miall, who spent 12 years working at top galleries in London and Asia before returning to Sydney in 2012, when she became the curator at Carriageworks. “That distinction between local and overseas artists is something that really struck me coming back from London because no other country seems to think of its artists in those very binary terms.”

She said the modest funding most Australian cultural institutions rely on to stage exhibitions meant local artists weren’t often afforded the same publicity as big-ticket international shows. But as the global arts establishment becomes increasingly interested in Australia, one of the only destin­ations physical exhibitions are able to take place, Miall said she expected this dynamic to change.

This year’s biennial takes its name from the accepted translation of a local Woiwurrung word “tarrawarra”, which refers to a stretch of the Birrarung — the Yarra River — that skirts the southern border of the museum’s grounds. “There is a lot happening in First Nations art and culture in this country, a lot of long overdue conversations are going on, that the international art world is starting to take notice of,” Miall said.

The biennial will run from March 27 to July 11 at the TarraWarra Museum in Healesville, Victoria.