After 18-Month Renovation, MCA Sydney Re-Opens

Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), the only Australian museum dedicated solely to contemporary art, will re-open Mar. 29, inaugurating a weeklong celebration.

The architect, Sydney-born Sam Marshall of Architect Marshall, oversaw the $56 million, 18-month makeover. His most visible addition to the imposing 1952 Art Deco Maritime Services Board Building, home to the MCA since 1990, is a new five-story structure with a striking geometric façade of interlocking brown, black and white blocks clad in glass reinforced concrete panels that alternate with the transparent planes of its windows.
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Heading up the Biennial Department: Q+A With Terence Riley

Shenzhen in Southern China, the fastest growing metropolis in the world, may just be the ideal location for an architecture biennial. Now in its fourth edition [through Feb. 18], the Shenzen Hong Kong Biennial (SZHKB) offers more than 60 innovative exhibitions in two venues, showcasing a host of ecologically conscious urbanization proposals.
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Andrew Rogers's Turkish Earthworks

Australian sculptor and earthworks artist Andrew Rogers has built on all seven continents (including Antarctica!), creating massive projects and then leaving the results to the collaborative forces of nature. "Time and Space," his latest venture and his most complex to date, is a "land art park" set in the Karadağ valley in Cappadocia in central Turkey. "I'm deeply interested in ancient cultures and civilizations, especially as repositories of memory; without memory, we are nothing," the artist told A.i.A. "I wanted to create a place that is a memorial to the past, as well as a present site for meditation, for speculation and dreaming."
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It Takes Two: Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen

Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen, a Beijing-based husband and wife team, are, as individual practitioners, among China's leading contemporary artists. They have collaborated for the last 10 years on a single ongoing project. "The Way of the Chopsticks III," the project's third iteration, is currently on view at Chambers Fine Art in New York, after premiering at the gallery's Beijing branch in June. To mark the tenth anniversary of "Chopsticks," Chambers opened its doors on 11/11/11 at precisely 11:11:11 am. The number 11, as Song points out, resembles a pair of chopsticks.

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