In his writings on late modernity, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm skewers art as the complicit refuge of the soul under capitalism, arguing that it’s impossible to understand nineteenth-century Western arts “without a sense of this social demand that they should act as all-purpose suppliers of spiritual contents to the most materialist of civilizations.” More recently, a claim to the spiritual and the numinous in art has also been levied by radical and anti-colonial agendas. As the European bias of art institutions has been challenged, so too has its relation to a secular and materialist world. Opening on March 1 and on Kaurna Yerta, the 2024 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art patiently and deftly explores this paradox. The exhibition is far from polemical: its emphasis lies squarely on artistic practice and the interior lives of artists. Through unexpected choices and combinations, in a presentation that spans two levels of the gallery and incorporates a number of collection interventions and public space projects, curator José Da Silva brings together works from vastly disparate traditions under the unifying thematic “Inner Sanctum.” The biennial’s far-reaching ambitions were marked from the start. At the show’s opening, viewers crowded into the Art Gallery of South Australia’s …