Cockatoo Island: when history collides with art

Derelict buildings and disused bunkers whisper stories, massive cranes and rusting machinery conjure up a sense of the clamour of industry even in absolute silence and the long eerie tunnels seem to dig right down into your soul. Cockatoo Island, just a short ferry ride from Circular Quay, is in fact a long journey into the history of Sydney and often your own subconscious.

The island, Sydney Harbour’s largest, is one of the few remnants of Australia’s convict history and has also played a major role in World War II. Named so after the sulphur-crested cockatoos that once frequented the island, it was established a gaol around 1840 to house convicts withdrawn from Norfolk Island. Later, with the fall of Singapore, Cockatoo Island became a major shipbuilding and dockyard facility for the South West Pacific during WWII.

Walking around the island, while you enjoy some of the most stunning views of the Harbour, you will also encounter dark bunkers once crammed with convicts and massive cranes that once lifted guns for the navy, locomotives for the railways as well as parts of the Harbour Bridge. The towering cranes along with the majestic chimneys make for a sculptural landscape for Cockatoo Island.

And until September 7, as part of the Biennale of Sydney 2008, the artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bargiev, has invited 35 international artists, to inhabit the history-imbued island with subliminal art works—some created specifically for the venue.

Among them, is Indian artist Nalini Malani’s ‘The tables have turned’ A shadow play. In a dome-shaped, disused military bunker, on the very edges of Cockatoo Island, transparent cylinders rotate slowly, projecting shadows of tigers and skulls and running children as they collide and disappear to create an epic narrative.

The installation, which references Buddhist prayer wheels, is Malani’s interpretation of the theme for the Biennale of Sydney 2008—Revolutions – Forms that Turn. Christov-Bargiev says, “Malani’s shadow and light installation is like a projection of the ghosts of the past and maybe the future,” she said.

One of the most haunting experiences on the Island is walking down the Dogleg Tunnel. Originally built to get men and equipment from one end of the island to the other quickly, it was also used as a bomb shelter during WWII. On a regular day, the tunnel contains a soundscape from the day after the Japanese submarine attack on Sydney Harbour in 1942.

However, during the Biennale, Australian artist TV Moore’s Escape Carnival, takes over the tunnel. I entered the dark, cold tunnel, feeling an instant shiver—the eerie unending series of wooden beams, dimply lit, fill with a sound installation consisting of psychedelia, pop, free-form comment, and the heavy breathing of someone running, escaping, or at least trying to escape. In one caged room, in a video projection, a man runs down that very tunnel—running nowhere, trapped endlessly within.

Walking through the massive turbine room in the industrial precinct, a soft, lone voice, a cry, a song, reverberates off the heavy machinery and adds a strange vitality to all the other art works in the building. That is Susan Phillipsz’s The Internationale, broadcast from a single speaker, will fill your ears the moment you enter the building, and keep you searching, wondering.

Meanwhile, Jannis Kounellis’s white sails fill the high ceiling rooms of the heavy machine shop, and you can loose yourself in this hypnotic installation. Vernon Ah Kee’s confronting, over-sized portraits of his family, line the wall of the long industrial room. Each of the 12 charcoal portraits stares unwavering, back at the viewer, demanding to be heard—Ah Kee turns the gaze back from the often “exotic” portraiture of primitives, in this case, Aboriginal Australians.

In the dockyard area of the island, partitions from a toilet block once used by dockworkers become part of Ah Kee’s second work in the Biennale, The Skin That I Live In. The partitions are smeared with homophobic and racist graffiti, the walls filled with vilifying abusive language, highlighting such attitudes that still permeate contemporary society.

On the plateau area, in a small barrack, lined with bunk beds, where convicts were once crammed in—about 500 at one time—Japanese artist Jin Kurashige recreates the claustrophobia in his video, His Shadow Enwraps Me. A man swivels the Rubik’s Cube madly, sweat pouring down his forehead, fingers moving calculatedly, constantly. Yet, much like TV Moore’s endlessly running protagonist, he too cannot stop—as soon as he achieves the perfect cube, he must start all over again, without a pause to enjoy his success.

After a day of soul searching aided by the Biennale artists, the sunset over Sydney’s stunning harbour, from the shores of Cockatoo Island is truly an experience not to be missed.