Lisa Slade curator of the 2016 Adelaide Biennial; Photo Nat Rogers, supplied
It has been 25 years since the first Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art was staged – now is a fitting time for re-visiting its model and taking greater ownership of its future says Lisa Slade, Curator of the 2016 exhibition and Assistant Director Artistic Programs of Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA).
Meeting with ArtsHub in an exclusive interview about the remodel, Slade said: ‘In order to expand the impact of the Biennial we have to share it.’
The exhibition will ‘fill a gap’, says Slade, with Adelaide International increasingly lacking in delivering visual arts programming within the Adelaide Festival. ‘They will not be doing the Adelaide International in the way they have approached it historically. We still absolutely see the Biennial as an important offering in the Festival, perhaps increasingly so.
‘We are very keen on building partnerships – cultural packaging – and building a stronger Adelaide brand across the visual arts sector,’ Slade continued.
In many ways, the new look Adelaide Biennial is more in sync with a traditional biennale model presenting an exhibition across several venues. In 2016 the Gallery will engage Samstag Museum, The Jam Factory, The Museum of Economic Botany and Carrick Hill in partnership to deliver the exhibition.
‘I think that by collaborating with Samstag – who were there for the inception of the Adelaide International program – it is a very symbolic gesture, and says that we can grow this together as opposed to being just a venue for a program,’ said Slade.
‘The ownership is less about geography and more about conception and creation, which is why we can happily expand,’ she added.
Over the last two editions of the Biennial, the AGSA has increasingly brought the exhibition more “in house”, last time curated by Director Nick Mitzevich.
‘There was a sense that we had become a kind of venue and Nick wanted us to be drivers, to own what was happening,’ explained Slade.
Her exhibition titled Magic Object, will offer a kind of counterpoint to Mitzevich’s Dark Heart in 2014, which had a mood of provocation and challenging ideas.
‘It is almost the antidote,’ said Slade. ‘We have very different ways of seeing even though we have worked together for 12 years now.’ Growing up just kilometers from each other, both come from an education background and broader audience access sits key to their shared modus operandi.
Slade with Director Nick Mitzevich; Photo Nat Rogers, supplied
“Biennale art” as a salve
‘I have long been attracted to materiality as a kind of salve, if you like, for a contemporary global disassociation from the world, that is, the idea that materials can help us grasp and know the world,’ said Slade of the foundations for her 2016 Biennial.
‘The idea that objects have biographies and life stories is something that has always driven my interest, and underpins any collection,’ she added.
‘This Biennial comes out of about a 10 year investigation into what the Wunderkammer means in the Antipodes for me. It is actually a northern perception. I am re-thinking it in terms of the south,’ explained Slade.
The Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, emerged in the sixteenth century as a European tradition – a room-sized view of the world that offered retreat for contemplation of nature and culture’s splendour.
‘I am interested in what happened to that very way of seeing when the Antipodes were encountered, and how Australian artists – and in particular how those with Aboriginal heritage – come to this knowing full well that the Wunderkammer is a double-edged sword when they were collected within it. They were the objects of curiosity, not the collectors of curiosity,’ said Slade.
It is a timely and timeless discussion in the way that museums collect objects, especially as within the recent spotlight turned towards provenance globally.
Slade added that Adelaide’s strong European heritage, and the city’s southern location, also added to this lineage with the Biennial’s theme.
‘This Biennial was driven by the audience as beholder, which fits perfectly with the 16th and 17th world view as it was the person walking into the Wunderkammer who made meaning, and no two experience would be the same.
‘And, more recently, we have taken to “wunderkammering” in the way that we display things,’ added Slade, referring to the celebrated hang of the Gallery.
What we can expect?
While Slade has explored this topic for over a decade, a recent trigger to Slade’s Wunderkammer was an earlier exhibition she has curated at The Museum of Economic Botany, which is the last remaining museum of its kind in the world. Built in the 1860s Slade described it as the ‘personification of a Wunderkammer … one of the challenges we are having with that venue is that it could almost be presented as a work of art in itself, so we are working with that conceptually.’
Mitzevich presented the work of Caroline Rothwell at the Museum for the last Adelaide Biennial.
From the intimacy of this venue, Slade said that working with Samstag Museum has given them the chance to work spatially.
‘We want to explore the echo, the parallel, the doublonage,’ said Slade, who told ArtsHub she will be using the whole new wing of the AGSA to echo Samstag.
‘I am interested in that void and how we can reconfigure the black cube from the white cube. I started to realise that there was even this kind of doubling in the way I was selecting artists; there were certain artists who were using virtuosity in their paintings – Michael Zavros and Chris Bond are both in the exhibition,’ revealed Slade.
Other artists Slade unveiled to ArtsHub were: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Heather B Swann, and Tom Moore with a giant inflatable sculpture out the front of the Gallery.
Slade also revealed that her Adelaide Biennial would be inter generational and cross cultural, ‘so a very strong presence of wunderkind (wonder kids) and wunderelders (elders of wisdom).’
Among them she named 101-year old Western Australian artist Loongkoonan and Bardi elder Roy Wiggan.
A full list will be announced in the coming months.
The 2014 Adelaide Biennial attracted a record number of 111,000 visitors, up 10% on 2012 Adelaide Biennial.
Magic Object, Slade’s Biennial is due to open on 27 February and will continue until 15 May, 2016.
