Worlds in Collision
Adelaide International 2014
28 February–16 March 2014
Curator: Richard Grayson (UK)
Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art
Australian Experimental Art Foundation
Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia
SASA Gallery
The Adelaide Festival’s Visual Arts program presents the third Adelaide International: Worlds in Collision, curated by Festival Visual Arts Curator Richard Grayson.
Featuring the work of nine international artists, the exhibition is located at four public galleries in Adelaide, Australia: Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia and SASA Gallery.
Worlds in Collision features artists who suggest new ways of modelling and imagining the world, who map the edges of what is known, and who investigate the potentials of what might lie beyond. Worlds in Collision looks at technological, political, psychological and psychedelic exploration and the ways artists imagine alternatives to arrive at new understandings of potential and transformation.
Time travel, digital frontiers, abandoned Star Wars sets, near-death experiences, new physics and second moons herald the foundations of this diverse and extraordinary selection of artists and artworks, shown across four sites.
Artists: Benedict Drew (UK), Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige (LEB/FRA), Susan Hiller (UK), Paul Laffoley (USA), Rä di Martino (ITA), Katie Paterson (UK), Fred Tomaselli (USA), Artur Żmijewski (POL)
Developed in collaboration with the participating galleries and supported by University of South Australia, the Adelaide International 2014: Worlds in Collision will consolidate the Adelaide Festival’s long history of engagement with contemporary art from around the world. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
As part of the Adelaide Festival’s Artists Week 2014, Lars Bang Larsen (DEN) will curate the Radical Enlightenment symposium. For Lars Bang Larsen (DEN) and Yann Chateigné (SUI), the radical Enlightenment we never had includes aesthetic and scientific experiments, countercultural movements, and entire modernities that have been disqualified as esoteric. After beginning the project at Geneva University, the two have staged exhibitions and seminars, most recently at the Palais De Tokyo in Paris. From mystical experiences and hermetic philosophies through to wayward cybernetics, network theories, electronic music, trans-humanism and futurology, this Adelaide symposium of talks and presentations will invoke the spirit of a radical Enlightenment by gauging exchanges between art, science and counter-culture.
Adelaide Festival 2014 presents the exclusive Australian premiere of River of Fundament, a major new seven-part film project by award-winning American artist Matthew Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler.
River of Fundament combines live theatre performances and opera into the medium of narrative cinema and will be Barney’s largest project since he completed the five-part The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002). The vast project, which involved several large-scale outdoor live performances, has been six years in the making and will have its world premiere in New York in February 2014, before coming to Adelaide.
Loosely based on Norman Mailer’s 1983 Novel Ancient Evenings, River of Fundament reimagines Mailer’s hypersexual story tale of Egyptian gods against the backdrop of the rise and fall of America’s car industry. Divided into interweaving scenes—each corresponding to the seven stages of reincarnation as described through Egyptian mythology—the film’s narrative is carried by musical and vocal performances in a variety of styles.
For more information:
www.adelaidefestival.com.au / info [at] adelaidefestival.com.au / T +61 (0) 8 8216 4444
