• Jannis Kounellis, Installation from Jannis Kounellis, Senza titolo (Progetto Sidney) [Untitled (Project for Sydney)], 2008, at Cockatoo Island for the 16th Biennale of Sydney 2008.
  This project was conceived by Jannis Kounellis for Cockatoo Island on the occasion of the Biennale of Sydney.
  Unable to come to Sydney, the project was installed by the Artistic Director. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Ben Symons.
  

Jannis Kounellis is one of the most challenging artists to have emerged in the 1960s. He moved to Rome from Greece in the late 1950s and became one of the protagonists of arte povera; developing an art of installation using poor materials and alluding to the symbols, weight and practice of labour and its poetic universe of revolutionary associations. Among his earliest iconic works is Senza titolo (Carboniera) [Untitled (Coal container)] (1967) – a square iron container on the floor filled with a pile of coal, reminiscent of the history of the monochrome and in particular of Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square of the early twentieth century. For the Biennale of Sydney, he has imagined the great Turbine Hall on Cockatoo Island as a space filled with air. Inverting inside and outside, the harbour and the shipyard, Kounellis stages a temporary installation: a forest of sails hanging in the Turbine Hall. For Kounellis, the artist is a person who ‘frees things without imposing anything’.

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