The Australian presence in the national participations at the 2009 Venice Biennale is centred on Shaun Gladwell the video artist, and a group exhibition of early career artists ---Vernon Ah Kee, Sean Cordeiro, Claire Healy and Ken Yonetani--entitled Once Removed curated by Felicity Fenner.


Shaun Gladwell, Apology to Roadkill 2007, Videography: Gotaro Uematsu, Photography: Josh Raymond

Gladwell is presenting Maddest Maximus in the Australian Pavilion. Influenced by his experiences in Australia’s landscape of the outback, and Mad Max movies, this work is a suite of five videos accompanied by sound and photographic works.

The Apology To Roadkill part of Maddest Maximus refers back to the cinema classic Wake In Fright (1971) and to a tradition of Australian landscape painting, such as Sidney Nolan's Desert And Drought paintings from 1949-53, which represented the Australian landscape in terms of the 'dead heart' and as the 'otherness' of European landscape.

The video stands against the heroic attempts to impose the artist on the landscape or to speak of himself as a stranger within it. It is not a story of resistance and eventual mastery of nature that is narrated, but one of cooperation, mutuality and care.