With the recent appointment of the freelance curator David Elliot as artistic director of the 17th edition, the Sydney biennale in 2010 promises to be thoroughly global, fittingly political and surprisingly unusual. The U.K.-born Elliot, who currently calls London, Berlin and Istanbul home, has a penchant for putting together large-scale exhibitions with a timely critical edge, such as “Wounds Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art,” which he curated while director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in the late 1990s, and “Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art and Life,” which he organized in 2003 for the Mori Art Museum, in Tokyo, where he was the founding director. Elliot has already conceived the biennale’s theme: The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age. His title hints at the fragile state of the world’s economy, environment and political climate, as well as underlining a “strong musical subtext,” he says, adding that “the patron saint of the show is [the late] Harry Smith, the avant-garde filmmaker, musicologist and ethnographer.” According to Elliot, Smith’s celebrated compilations of American folk performers in the 1950s “changed the face of contemporary popular music.”

Although the bienniale traditionally includes artists from around the world, with a strong contingent of Australians, one of Elliot’s working themes, First People, Fourth Worlds, suggests that artists operating outside the mainstream contemporary art machine will be included. “ ‘First People’ is the First World, ‘Fourth Worlds’ is a diasporic people,” Elliot explains. Marah Braye, the biennale’s CEO, expects “a visionary and diverse event.” "Perilous Times" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2008 Table of Contents.