All Kinds Of Amazing At The Adelaide Biennial

1. Ghostpatrol

Growing up in Tasmania, David Booth (aka Ghostpatrol) felt a long way from the rest of the world. It was this sense geographical isolation that prompted him to create his own fantasy lands through drawings, paintings and sculptures, and later in street art adorning Melbourne’s laneways.

Ghostpatrol lays out a collection of colourful critters and creatures in World Builder – All my friends and none of my enemies, a vibrant, epic mural reaching across the walls of the Art Gallery of South Australia for the Adelaide Biennial.

Art Gallery of South Australia
North Terrace,
Adelaide, South Australia

2. Daniel Boyd

Visual artist Daniel Boyd is a Kudjla/Gangalu man, born in Giangurra (far North Queensland) and now based in Sydney. Through the lights of deep space, Daniel explores family oral histories and subverts colonial narratives of Australia in TEACH A MAN TO FISH.

Immersive and ethereal, viewers physically enter Daniel’s cosmos becoming connected to the stories told by his constellations of moons and stars.

Art Gallery of South Australia
North Terrace,
Adelaide, South Australia

3. Christian Thompson

A Bidjara man, London-based Christian Thompson is an academic and multi-disciplinary artist (he also happens to be one of the first Aboriginal Australians accepted to the University of Oxford in 2009) whose work is as visually arresting as it is politically and culturally potent. Creating across photography, film and soundscapes, Christian’s work summons explorations of sexuality, race, history and identity through a contemporary lens.

As part of Divided Worlds, the artist presents works across two locations.

A soundscape featuring Christian singing in Bidjara can be heard from the Palm House at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens in an exploration of archiving his father’s language, which is classified as extinct. By using the words, Christian keeps them alive.

Nearby, the striking photographic works Loom Aura I and Loom Aura II hang at Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art.

Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art
Hawke Building,
City West campus
55 North Terrace,
Adelaide, South Australia

Adelaide Botanic Gardens
Palm House
Adelaide, South Australia

4. Patricia Piccinini

Isn’t it funny how human hair immediately takes on a grotesque quality the moment it is detached from its natural origins?

Australian art royalty Patricia Piccinini asks viewers to confront their discomfort when experiencing her work, and her piece for the Adelaide Biennial is no exception.

Equal parts unnerving and beautiful, Divided Worlds, The Avian Trilogy (Eagle in flight with helmets) features an eagle made of human hair, wings fully spread and glorious in mid-flight. Emerging from a suggestively fleshy background, Patricia’s eagle holds with it contradictions of ‘life and lifelessness, delight and revulsion, familiarity and foreignness’.

Art Gallery of South Australia
North Terrace,
Adelaide, South Australia

5. Pip & Pop

Have you ever wondered what it would look like if a unicorn exploded in a small space? It would probably be something along the lines of pip & pop’s (aka Tanya Schultz’s) magical piece for the Biennial, Darkness will disappear, magic light gonna take you for a ride…

pip & pop’s work fills a ‘cave-like void’ between two exhibition spaces,  inducing a sense of wonder and excitement, like only fluorescent colours and glitter can.

Art Gallery of South Australia
North Terrace,
Adelaide, South Australia

6. Tamara Dean

Tamara Dean explores life, death and nature through her enchanting photographic work. With feet planted firmly in the natural world, Tamara’s subjects and their composition take on a dreamlike quality.

In Our Nature is in some ways a site-specific work, where Tamara has captured her subjects during the change of seasons at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. The installation work shown at the Museum of Economic Botany draws parallels between the seasonal shifts, cycles of nature and aging, connecting human life to our external environment.

Stream of Consciousness, is installed around a large reflection pool, where the work transforms and shifts as the water moves in the space.

Adelaide Botanical Garden
Museum of Economic Botany

Art Gallery of South Australia
North Terrace
Adelaide, South Australia

Divided Worlds is free admission and takes place at various locations around Adelaide between March 3rd-June 3rd. For more information visit adelaidebiennial.com.au/2018.