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Art Column

Adelaide Biennial 2024

Published April 24, 2024
Khaled Sabsabi, 'Knowing Beyond' (2024)

It’s rare one comes across a survey exhibition that feels so personal, so achingly sincere, as the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, subtitled Inner Sanctum. Guest curator, José Da Silva, has put heart and soul into his choices and gone to great pains to explain them in the catalogue, writing at length on every artist.

George Cooley, triptych of the Kanku-Breakaways

This doesn’t guarantee a show of masterpieces, but it’s a masterful display of the curator’s art, which is essentially one of persuasion. Even if you don’t love everything assembled here – and there are plenty of things which leave me cold – you have to respect the effort that has gone into the presentation. Da Silva, whose day job is director of the UNSW Galleries in Sydney, has understood that it’s not sufficient put a bunch of things in a room and assume audiences will love it.

Market Santiago, ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ (2022)

The works in Inner Sanctum complement each other, adding up to a vision of the world, yet there is no grand, overarching theme. The show features “twenty-four artists and poets who share an interest in the human condition.” This may seem akin to saying nothing, as one only needs to be human to share that interest, but it’s also a reminder of all the distractions, all the ideological claptrap and white noise we put between ourselves and life’s most fundamental experiences.

What are those experiences? Birth, family, nature, love and death. We all feel the need to belong somewhere, to be part of a family and a community. We all ponder the nature of the universe, many of us seeking solace in religion. We need to love and be loved. We all need to come to terms with death and loss. Da Silva’s Inner Sanctum is a place of contemplation in which we are invited to reflect on the ways a group of artists and poets have related to these things.

Nik Pantazopoulos, ‘Elevations’ (2023-24)

The inclusion of poets – Kate Llewellyn, Evelyn Araluen, Ellen Van Neerven, Ali Cobby Eckermann and Jazz Money – is one of the innovations of this exhibition. There are words on the walls and in the catalogue, often accompanied by images. Words have been set to music and included as performances. Artists have been encouraged to include their own poetic efforts.

I’m not sure there’s any great literature being uncovered here, although Kate Llewellyn seems by far the most polished wordsmith. What’s important is the way the poetry helps establish a tone for the show and a frame for the visual works. Words and images are presented as vehicles of thought and feeling of roughly equivalent value. In most exhibitions, poetry appears as nothing more than a passing line on a wall label or a source of reference for a painting or sculpture.

Jessica Loughlin, ‘Solari’ (2024)

The show is divided into five ‘poetic’ stanzas: The Inland Sea; A Clearing, A Periphery; The River Path; A Quiet Spot, and The Writing of Love and Finding It.It’s easy to find affinities between artists in the way they address the unspoken themes of the show. For instance, Lillian O’Neil’s photo collages and Marikit Santiago’s flamboyant paintings on cardboard are both concerned with the experience of motherhood, both with a strong mythological dimension. Khaled Sabsabi and Nik Pantazopoulos dabble in large-scale, mystical abstraction. Teelah George makes embroidered portraits of the sky, while Jessica Loughlin captures the light of day in a transcendental, sculptured glass window.

The late Peter Maloney and Heather B. Swann are both fixated on death, albeit in different ways. Maloney’s Depth of My Soul (2022), made shortly before he died, is a genuinely scary picture. An “amoeba” shaped face, in black and yellow, displays a row of sharp teeth and two large, misshapen eyes. It’s set against a white, misty backdrop where one may discern the words: “Father I feel nothingness invade me”. The line comes from Mallarmé via Paul Auster. In this instance, it’s a cri de coeur from an artist who feels the advance of the illness that would shortly remove him from the world. File it alongside Picasso’s last self-portrait, where he stares death in the face, the skull visible beneath his skin.

Peter Maloney, ‘Depth of My Soul’ (2022),

In Swann’s extensive body of work, which comprises paintings, sculptures and works on paper, the artist is an observer, feeling the looming presence of death while trying to find a point of philosophical accommodation. Feelings of grief and anger may be discerned in these sombre works that feel like the artefacts of a mystery cult. The works on paper are far more expressive, particularly the ones using words.

One of the surprises of the show is George Cooley of Coober Pedy (AKA. Umoona), who paints numerous variations on that region’s dramatic ridges and escarpments, in a confident expressionistic style in which thick swathes of paint are balanced by a clear, flat sky. These most recent pictures are on an unprecented scale and serve as signature works for the show. The largest, a triptych, is set over the desk in the entrance, smaller ones are being used in the children’s education studio. For Cooley it’s a big, impressive step up.

Heather B. Swann, ‘Railhead’ (2023)

By including relatively few artists, Da Silva allows each of them to be seen in depth. This works well for an artist such as Teelah George, whose wall hangings defy classification, being part-tapestry, part-sculpture, with a pronounced painterly dimension. They are not exactly abstract, being based on views of the sky. They are highly structured, as any embroidery must be, but with an utterly informal appearance.

Clara Adolphs also benefits from a generous alotment of exhibition space, as her low-toned paintings based on antique photos are far more engaging when seen as an ensemble rather than as one-offs. As with all paintings in which a style or technique overshadows the subject, the eye is instantly captured but not so easily convinced.

Jacobus Capone, from ‘Forewarning’ (2023)

For sheer, bloody-minded determination, nobody can match Jacobus Capone, who in 2022 travelled from his hometown of Perth to the Paulabreen Glacier in Svalbard, Norway, to trace a single line on a vast wall of ice with a hunting knife. The multi-channel video that shows Capone edging his way unsteadily across this remote, dangerous wilderness is as spectacular as his gesture is futile. The futility is really the point, as this glacier is rapidly melting, bringing the climate catastrophe closer, drip by drip. By now, that hard-won line on the ice will have already disappeared.

Teelah George, ‘A clearing, a periphery’ (2019)

One of the aspects of this exhibition that is most to be admired is the way Da Silva has managed to include all the issues so beloved of contemporary curators but never in a doctrinaire manner. Indigenous artists are able to tell their stories, but so are their non-indigenous peers. So-called “queer” love is love pure and simple. By stressing the subjective, intimate side of each artist’s work, we get the impression that individual expression is far more important than having the right political credentials. In realising this, the curator has shown it’s possible to escape the dead weight of political correctness that is driving audiences out the doors of art museums while still giving ample scope to each artist’s sacred core of ‘identity’.

 

Inner Sanctum:

18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

1 March – 2 June 2024

 

 

Published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April, 2024