Adelaide Festival’s visual art program “Adelaide//International” is this year focusing on architecture and how it shapes people’s experience of the world.
The exhibition series at the Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art at UniSA’s City West Campus will feature five discrete exhibitions exploring notions of experience, time and architecture. The exhibitions are running for the duration of the annual arts festival, from Friday 28 February to Sunday 15 March.
According to the curators, while the program in 2019 focused on perceptions of the past, and next year’s will focus on the future, this year’s program is all about the present.
The centrepiece of the exhibition series is Somewhere Other by John Wardle Architects, which was an Australian contribution to the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.
The multi-faceted timber structure was developed with installation artist and filmmaker Natasha Johns-Messenger and constructed by joiner Jacaranda Industries and it includes it includes work commissioned by filmmakers Coco and Maximilian.
It was awarded the Jørn Utzon Award for International Architecture at the 2019 National Architecture Awards, with the jury describing it as “a piece of furniture, a series of frames, a “camera” and an experience.”
“The polished Australian timbers induce visitors to a slow touch at a portal, to run fingers along the corrugated snout, or to make a close inspection of the meticulous joinery,” the jury stated.
Also on exhibition is Belgian artist David Claerbout’s monumental real-time moving-image work Olympia, which charts the disintegration into ruins of the Berlin Olympic Stadium over the course of one thousand years.
First Nations artist Brad Darkson is showing a sound and sculptural work that is “a critique of antagonistic systems and architectures.”
A work by artists Zoë Croggon, Helen Grogan and Georgia Saxelby features “startling and graceful juxtapositions of architecture with the human form.”
And next door at the School of Art, Architecture and Design’s SASA Gallery, Matthew Bird responds to the Adelaide//International with Inspiral, “a speculation on the afterlife of architecture.”
