Page 21 - Art Almanac (February 2020)

Adelaide Festival

‘Adelaide Festival’ celebrates a 60-year milestone with over 70 events taking place around the
city from 28 February to 15 March, and will be sharing the spotlight with the 30th anniversary
of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s ‘Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’ showcasing ‘Monster
Theatres’. Curator Leigh Robb says the show ’proposes an arena of speculation, a circus of the
unorthodox and the absurd, a shadow play between truth and fiction.’

Visual art, theatre, music, opera, dance, film and writing across 16 Australian premieres and
seven world debuts alongside 17 events exclusive to Adelaide fill the program.

Major highlights include Samstag Museum of Art’s ‘2020 Adelaide//International’, which
explores how built forms can engage us in the social, spatial and temporal present across five
exhibits including ‘Somewhere Other’ by artists John Wardle and New York-based Natasha
Johns-Messenger. A group show with Zoë Croggon, Helen Grogan and Georgia Saxelby, as well
as a moving-image work by Belgian artist David Claerbout, a sound and sculptural work by
First Nations artist Brad Darkson, and at SASA Gallery is artist and architect Matthew Bird’s
experimental project ‘Inspiral’.

‘Adelaide Writers’ Week’ contemplates ‘Being Human’ from 29 February to 5 March, and will
launch the commemorative book ‘Adelaide Festival – 60 Years’. And ‘WOMADelaide’ unfolds over
four days with music, arts and dance in the Botanic Park from 6 to 9 March.

adelaidefestival.com.au

John Wardle Architects, Somewhere Other, installed in the Arsenale di Venezia for the 2018 Biennale Architettura
Photograph: Peter Bennetts
Courtesy the artists and Samstag Museum of Art, South Australia
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