Finding Refuge in Inner Sanctum: The 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art

The 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum is a rich survey exhibition presenting twenty-four artists and poets whose work reflects contemporary Australian art practice now and who are united by a shared interest in the human condition.

Biennials, or biennales, are no mean feat—for curators, artists, host institutions, and audiences. The challenge lies in the delicate dance of marrying a cohesive curatorial theme with the artists selected, balancing the practical aspects of the gallery and potential installation constraints, navigating the artists’ intentions and amount of output realised, whilst considering how audiences will react in two years’ time, and what kind of world that might indeed be in. With all this in mind, one must unravel a biennial accordingly.

Curated by UNSW Galleries Director José Da Silva and titled Inner Sanctum, the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia (Kaurna Yerta), is a rich survey exhibition presenting twenty-four artists and poets whose work reflects contemporary Australian art practice now.

Inner Sanctum, Da Silva’s conceptual premise, encourages us to take refuge, seek a place of sanctuary, and to go within. By rethinking those places we create in our homes, in communities, the art museum, or where we may connect the ordinary to the divine, we are offered the opportunity to pause and reflect, to find hope and potentially be transformed. Da Silva posits: “Inner Sanctum is activated by universal, timeless impulses and speaks to the rich tapestry of cultural and aesthetic inheritances in Australian art; a leaning into spiritual or philosophical contemplation, honouring our emotional inner worlds; and the transformative potential of art and exhibitions to enlighten the social imagination.”

The Biennial is curated across five key interconnected themes, poetically titled The Inland Sea; A Clearing, A Periphery; The River Path; A Quiet Spot; and The Writing of Love and Finding It. These subthemes reflect on time, Country and the landscape, memory, spirituality, the body and domesticity, and ancestral knowledge and mythology. These themes also set the framework for the placement of the artists’ projects, which broadly span both the collection and temporary galleries.

At first the selection of artists appears quite disparate, however after deeper engagement connections and threads exist. Significant projects, such as a suite of large-scale colourful drawings of doors by Nik Pantazopoulos, Jessica Loughlin’s site-specific glass “window” sculpture in collaboration with the late Khai Liew, Lillian O’Neil’s rigorously constructed photographic collages, and Tongan artist Ruha Fifita’s intricately painted Mulberry bark cloth, provide important discoveries and celebrate a diversity of artistic practice.

Painting features strongly and as a medium connects artists such as Clara Adolphs, Christopher Bassi (Meriam, Yupungathi, Muslim Indian, and British descent), George Cooley (Antakirinja Matu-Yankunytjatjara), Marikit Santiago, and Vivienne Shark LeWitt throughout the myriad of gallery spaces. Additionally, ambitious in scale and with a clarity of execution, Seth Birchall’s work thoughtfully addresses nature, the urgent need to protect it and our connection to it through memory, experience, and time. His suite of high-key paintings, including Wonderful Wondrous Waterfall, 2023, depict waterways, skylines, and arboreal forms, and are installed alongside a custom bench designed by Jonathan West that offers a space to sit and reflect. These sublime “time of day” paintings located in the collection galleries are joyful, colourful renderings of sunrise or dusk.

Located in the temporary galleries, the Australian South Sea Islander artist Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s work As Above, So Below, 2022–2023, brings into focus Australia’s colonial legacy and participation in the Pacific “blackbird” slave trade. The installation features 369 Tam tam (slit drum) cast plaster sculptures, representing the bodies detailed in engravings for the British slave ship Brookes. Tam tam drums are a form of communication in the Pacific with their resonant sound said to be that of ancestral spirits. Placed on the floor, echoing the shape of a ship’s hull, the project also comprises decorative nineteenth century ceiling panels referencing Togo-Brisby’s ancestors who in 1899 were enslaved to the Wunderlich family—known for their manufacturing of rosettes and other such interior decorations. It is a visually impactful installation, with layers of meaning, both personal and historical.

Another ambitious body of work is Sky piece, 2016-ongoing, by Teelah George, with early works in this series displayed alongside recent work for the first time. Mapping the colour of the sky through large-scale embroideries, often set inside decadent bronze sculptural frames, George’s works are remarkable in their labour, detail, and intricacy. These rich colour fields celebrate the artist’s interest in material culture.

Poetry, music, and performance feature significantly in Da Silva’s curation. Uniting the churches of Adelaide as part of a city-wide bell-ringing performance across the opening weekend, Lawrence English, known for his sound work, activated a new 712 kilogram bell, Proximities, 2024, fabricated with master bellmaker Anton Hasell. Further, Kate Llewellyn AM, a poet and memoirist, was commissioned to create a new poem, Faith, 2023, which was transformed into a choral piece. Adapted by composer Anne Cawrse, the music was performed in the collection galleries by members of the Adelaide Chamber Singers, known for their madrigal work. All Flesh is Fire, 2024, reflects on what it might mean to have a spiritual life in the contemporary present.

Additionally, in 2022, poet and artist Jazz Money (Wiradjuri) was invited to write an anthem for the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Choir. This is how we love, 2022, was conceived as a poem and arranged into a choral work by Joseph Twist, then performed at the Sydney Town Hall. In the Biennial, the anthem is transformed into a multi-channel sound installation, using pendant speakers to create a chorus of voices which gloriously echo throughout the gallery spaces.

A moment of visceral impact and wondrous spectacle is Western Australian artist Jacobus Capone’s series of three large-scale video works that document his physical actions in the remote and hostile Larsbreen glacier on the Svalbard archipelago, located between Norway’s mainland and the North Pole. In Forewarning (Act 1), 2023, Capone is seen kneeling on the icy ground, placing the tip of a hunting knife against the ice and later walking and drawing a single line across the glacier’s face. Accompanied by a haunting and evocative soundscape of windswept cracking ice, evidence of the glacier’s reduction, Capone’s work depicts the violence and ecological grief associated with humanity’s impact on nature.

Biennials are not without their pivots. Tiwi artist Kaye Brown presented an assembled body of work celebrating connections between Country, family, and ceremonial practice. Devastatingly, seven new paintings and two carved poles Brown made for the Biennial were destroyed in a trucking incident and fire in Queensland enroute to the AGSA in late January 2024. Instead, Brown borrowed barks, made by her and members of her community, from museums for display alongside an informative documentary.

Together these projects culminate in a reflective, “quieter” exhibition that brings together a wide array of practitioners across art, poetry, and music in an open-ended, expansive manner. It is without ego and balanced in its curation. Whilst not overly “challenging” in the usual sense of what one might expect of a biennial—overt spectacle often leading to visual fatigue—it offers the opportunity to reconsider our expectations, of artists and inflated levels of “entertainment” and visual consumption.

It is pleasurable to quietly look and engage with art, rather than be viscerally blown away. One senses that the artists, while pushing the boundaries of their chosen mediums, are searching for truth and meaning in a world that is ever evolving. Whilst we may yearn for more moments of crescendo in Inner Sanctum, finding nuance and refuge is an often underrated but equally important experience.

This review was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 67

EXHIBITION
18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum
1 March – 2 June 2024
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide