David Haines 1500's Production still from video installation 'Night Sequence'. Digitally generated image from various sources, 2001

(The World May Be) Fantastic explores the way artists use narratives, models, fictions and fabrications to challenge and to change our interpretations of the world.

Since its inauguration in 1973 at the Sydney Opera House, the Biennale of Sydney has presented the best of international and national contemporary art and is now ranked as one of the most important exhibitions of its type in the world. It has been provocative, edgy, entertaining and uplifting.

For the first time in its history, the Biennale of Sydney has chosen a practising artist, Richard Grayson, as its Artistic Director. With input from an advisory panel consisting of Susan Hiller (artist), Ralph Rugoff (cultrural theorist and curator) and Janos Sugar (artist and writer), Grayson's exhibition explores the intersections between reality and fantasy.

It's about how the fantastic collides with the real world. About invented systems and invented people, about countries and histories that never have existed, about flying machines and strange museums, conspiracy theories and unusual readings of the 'normal'.

The exhibition, displayed in multiple venues across Sydney, features the work of approximately 58 artists from Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Korea, Mexico, Norway, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States of America.