Silvana and Gabriella Mangano’s “Of Objects or Sound” at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney 

The 2014 Sydney Biennale was evidence that video art is all the rage; but it was also proof that it takes more than a good idea to create compelling and engaging video-based artworks. Melbourne-based gallerist Anna Schwartz’s cavernous gallery space at Carriageworks in Sydney, which adjoins the wing that housed the majority of the video art exhibited as part of the 2014 Sydney Biennale, has emerged as an excellent test site for the medium. The same space that was subsumed by Berlin-based South African artist Candice Breitz’s mesmerizing 2006 25-channel installation “Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon)” has once again been transformed and by another superb video-based installation, this time by the Melbourne-based collaborative duo comprising identical twins Silvana Mangano and Gabriella Mangano. The exhibition, entitled “Of Objects or Sound,” consists of two distinct bodies of work that the artists created during a recent International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) residency in New York.