With the increasing commercialization of biennials and art fairs, can revolutionary ideas retain their relevancy in the art world? The 2008 Biennale of Sydney explores the progressive, the subversive, and the transgressive in a variety of media. More than 180 artists from 42 countries take up the exhibition theme of Revolutions — Forms That Turn, a pun that artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev deepens as "the impulse to revolt. Revolving, rotating, mirroring, repeating, reversing, turning upside down or inside out, changing perspectives." She adds, "I think it is important to shift biennales away from content-based shows, to remind people of the politics of language itself. Revolutions focuses instead on 'the formal gestures embedded in the etymology of the word.'"

In addition to exhibiting newer works, Christov-Bakargiev sourced institutional loans, retrieving past treasures from Australian and international collections in a gesture of historical reappraisal. With limited Asian and regional participation, her Eurocentric view at the Art Gallery of South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art steers towards iconic 20th-century works by Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alexander Calder, and Hans Bellmer. Movement abounds with Marcel Duchamp's famous Bicycle Wheel on a stool, Francis Alÿs' nine video perspectives of a stumbling man, and Shaun Gladwell's installation of mountain bikes-turned-sound instruments accompanying a video of stunt-riders. One of the most raucous works is Christoph Büchel's group of octogenarians singing the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen," while Tony Schwensen takes the prize for most humorous with Fundrazor, a barbecue staged outside the MCA to raise funds for 2010 Biennale projects.

Taking a ferry to the new venue Cockatoo Island is certainly one of the Biennale's highlights. With past incarnations as a prison, a shipyard, and a reformatory for wayward girls, Cockatoo's dilapidated spaces are filled with single-channel videos and large-scale installations. Richard Bell poses in a video as a black Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyzing well-known Australians, while Mike Parr's sequence of violent and visceral performances becomes especially confrontational amid the grime, chicken feathers, and stench of urine in the former sailors' quarters. Based on Nikolai Gogol's The Nose, William Kentridge's newly narrated commission lures viewers in droves with its multichannel, animated projection of Russian characters and symbols. Elsewhere, the voluminous Turbine Hall contains Jannis Kounellis' forest of boat sails and Vernon Ah Kee's haunting pastel-and-charcoal portraits of Aboriginal families.

Sound works are plentiful, including projects by TV Moore and Susan Phillipsz on Cockatoo Island and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's The Murder of Crows at Pier 2/3. Christov-Bakargiev may have been tempted to fill the cavernous pier warehouse with an architectural intervention, but she instead deployed sound to draw on the poetry of the empty site: inspired by Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Cardiff and Miller's 100 single-channel recordings — all on individual speakers — morph into dreamlike incantations in a marching requiem.

Artspace, the Royal Botanic Gardens, and the Sydney Opera House — where Pierre Huyghe created a 24-hour spectacle, with an installation of live trees and mist replacing the stage and seats — also host projects, while revolutionsonline, a web-only venue, presents a variety of digital work in an ever-changing space.

-Natalie King