For over sixty years, Adelaide Festival has brought communities together to celebrate the arts. This year, the multi-venue showcase offers a dynamic program of 175 events as theatre, music, opera, dance, film, and visual art unfold across both physical and live-streamed encounters from 3 to 19 March 2023.
At the Art Gallery of South Australia, an exhibition on Andy Warhol reflects on the once-exclusive medium of photography versus the now ever-present platform of social media. Posing the question, was Warhol the original influencer?, this exhibition showcases Warhol’s photographs, experimental films and paintings, including the artist’s famed portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, alongside works by his photographic collaborators, including Christopher Makos, Robert Mapplethorpe and Duane Michals.
Kasia Tons, Citrus skin balaclava, 2022, dried citrus skin, cotton, cotton canvas, and beeswax, 19 × 19 × 19cm (irreg). Photograph: Emmaline Zanelli. Courtesy the artist, Santos Museum of Economic Botany, South Australia and Adelaide Festival, South Australia
At Samstag Museum of Art, similarly, the real image is manipulated in Night for Day by British artist Emily Wardill, who constructs a psychologically complex work about ideologies and communication; Tasmanian-born, Lisbon-based James Newitt explores the detachment and autonomy of island utopias in the multimedia piece HAVEN; and ceramicist Bruce Nuske is joined by furniture designer Khai Liew in a playful take on mixed mediums.
In Biotic Commune at the Santos Museum of Economic Botany, Adelaide textile artist Kasia Tons crafts an embroidered reflection on the nineteenth-century museum’s collection of “useful plants.” Carrick Hill estate artist-in-residence South Australian artist Catherine Truman presents The Arrangements: assembling nature – an investigation into our impact on the environment. Similarly, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental hosts A river that flows both ways: Selected works from the 23rd Biennale of Sydney: rīvus, which expand on environmental themes, including pollution, climate change, and the effect of colonisation on First Peoples’ custodianship of ecosystems.
