As Juliana Engberg puts it in Kerry Gardner’s book, Australia at the Venice Biennale: ’To participate in the Venice Biennale is to have the opportunity to enter into a milieu of experimentation, contest of ideas, dialogue of forms and discovery of shared and divergent aesthetics – each pursuing a way to express the sentiments, contexts and issues of our time.’
A few months later that year, the Australia Council announced a new open call format that was introduced for the 2019 iteration, advocated by La Biennale di Venezia as a way to uphold the non-commercial nature of the event.
