‘Adelaide Festival’ celebrates a 60-year milestone with over 70 events taking place around the city from 28 February to 15 March 2020, and will be sharing the spotlight with the 30th anniversary of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s ‘Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’ showcasing ‘Monster Theatres’. Curator Leigh Robb says the show ‘proposes an arena of speculation, a circus of the unorthodox and the absurd, a shadow play between truth and fiction.’
John Wardle Architects, Somewhere Other, installed in the Arsenale di Venezia for the 2018 Biennale Architettura. Photograph: Peter Bennetts. Courtesy the artists and Samstag Museum of Art, South Australia
Visual art, theatre, music, opera, dance, film and writing across 16 Australian premieres and seven world debuts alongside 17 events exclusive to Adelaide fill the program.
Major highlights include Samstag Museum of Art’s ‘2020 Adelaide//International’, which explores how built forms can engage us in the social, spatial and temporal present across five exhibits including ‘Somewhere Other’ by artists John Wardle and New York-based Natasha Johns-Messenger. A group show with Zoë Croggon, Helen Grogan and Georgia Saxelby, as well as a moving-image work by Belgian artist David Claerbout, a sound and sculptural work by First Nations artist Brad Darkson, and at SASA Gallery is artist and architect Matthew Bird’s experimental project ‘Inspiral’.
‘Adelaide Writers’ Week’ contemplates ‘Being Human’ from 29 February to 5 March 2020, and will launch the commemorative book ‘Adelaide Festival – 60 Years’. And ‘WOMADelaide’ unfolds over four days with music, arts and dance in the Botanic Park from 6 to 9 March 2020.
