Indigenous artist Tony Albert’s take on Sorry. Source: The Australian

A SPECTACULAR display of art from the first 10 years of the 21st century tells us, on the surface, that anything goes, and everyone is welcome.

21st Century: Art in the First Decade, opening in Brisbane on Saturday, includes Carston Holler’s giant slides in the Gallery of Modern Art’s towering central atrium. Viewers will be invited to become players, as they spiral down inside it, contemplating what it means to get this close to contemporary art.

Damien Hirst will be represented by a screenprint based on his 2007 skull embedded with diamonds, an example, curator David Burnett says, of the way many contemporary artists now “merge the distant and recent past with the present in revealing the condition and complexities of our age”.

A room half-full of purple balloons, a giant triumphal arch made of cardboard boxes, and a carefully constructed, temperature controlled room full of live finches that make music as they go about their daily tasks, are among 180 works by 110 artists from 40 countries in an ambitious show that, once again, puts out a statement from Queensland Art Gallery about its “commitment to be truly international”, as director Tony Ellwood says.

Significantly, alongside some of the top names in world contemporary art including Martin Creed, Olafur Eliasson, Yayoi Kusama and Ai Weiwei, some of the artists in 21st Century represent parts of the world only recently entering into global art.

Romuald Hazoume from Benin in West Africa, Armando Andrade Tudela from Peru and Pascale Marthine Tayou from Cameroon are some of the artists taking part in an ambitious attempt to bring audiences up to date with the dizzying variety of art now being made, not just in the traditional centres for collecting and exhibiting, but in every region of the world.

“We haven’t sought a cohesive, unified experience,” Ellwood says, “but rather a reflection on the polymorphous nature of the world.”