Moments from Cockatoo Island

Cockatoo Island spent a hundred and fifty years as one of the harshest working sites in Sydney Harbour: a convict penal station in the mid-nineteenth century, then a major shipyard and dockyard that built and repaired vessels through both World Wars, before closing down in the 1990s and sitting largely abandoned. Since 2008 it has become the flagship venue of the Biennale of Sydney, its cavernous industrial sheds, rusted machine halls, and underground tunnels turned over to large-scale contemporary installations that would simply overwhelm a conventional white-cube gallery.

Getting there is part of the experience, a ferry ride across the harbor that most first-time visitors don't expect from what sounds like a fairly ordinary art outing. Wear real shoes and expect a lot of walking and some genuinely rough, unfinished industrial terrain, this is not a climate-controlled museum circuit. The scale of the buildings tends to dwarf individual works, so give yourself time to let your eyes adjust to each cavernous space before judging a piece, art that would read as monumental in a normal gallery can look almost modest inside a dry dock built for warships.