Adelaide International 2010:
Apart, we are together
2010 Adelaide Festival
25 February – 30 April 2010
Curator: Victoria Lynn
http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au
Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art
Australian Experimental Art Foundation
Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia
Flinders University City Gallery
JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design
In celebration of the Adelaide Festival’s 50th anniversary, the Visual Arts Program presents the inaugural Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together, curated by Festival Visual Arts Curator Victoria Lynn.
The exhibition includes the work of 13 international artists, located at five public galleries in Adelaide, Australia: Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Flinders University City Gallery and JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design.
Addressing the theme of the Festival: the heart, the artists in this exhibition express an impulse to connect – with a person, a location, or a state of being. These gestures stem from both compassion and resistance, embracing the spirit of inclusion and hospitality, as well as a celebration of different points of view. The works demonstrate the ways in which artists today are concerned with manifesting renewed senses of connection.
Such assemblages and encounters often result in an unravelling of one world view behind another, not simply to create an alternative, or an amalgam of possibilities, but to invent a different mode of connection that is entangled, intermingled and temporal. It is no accident that much of this work is based in process or performance, in the use of the interview or the documentation of sites and behaviours, for the artists are very much concerned with their contemporary everyday world, even if it is a place they do not belong. As such, they resort to the everyday, modest gesture – sticking, conversing, playing, recording – to create works that emanate from a sense of compassion. This is also about trying to make sense of a world that has such extreme economies of scale, apparent in our civic spaces, contested homelands and global media. Such monumental symbols are countered by un-monumental relations.
Artists: Rossella Biscotti (Italy), Tara Donovan (USA), Nina Fischer and Maroan El Sani (Germany), Julian Hooper (NZ), Iman Issa (Egypt), Donghee Koo (Republic of Korea), Li Mu (People’s Republic of China), Lucy + Jorge Orta (UK/France), Raeda Saadeh (Palestine), Praneet Soi (India/Netherlands), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand).
Developed in collaboration with the participating galleries and supported by University of South Australia, the Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together 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.
The Festival also presents Artists’ Week: Art in the Global Present, a four day symposium featuring international speakers Ranjit Hoskote (India), Geert Lovink (Netherlands), Lucy Orta (UK/France), Gerald Raunig (Austria) and Michael Taussig (USA) alongside several Australian artists and academics including Deborah Kelly, Adrian Martin, Scott McQuire, Callum Morton, Anna Munster, Stephen Muecke and Nikos Papastergiadis.
The Adelaide Festival’s Visual Arts program is also proud to be in partnership with the Art Gallery of South Australia in their presentation of the Before and After Science: 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art and Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute’s exhibition by the proppaNOW collective, Putsch.
For more information:
http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au
info [at] adelaidefestival.com.au
+61 (0)8 8216 4444