Free/State – 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art review
Everywhere you look at the Biennial, cultures beg for recognition, and the arguments pull at your identity.
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Free/State – Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art
Visual Art
Art Gallery of SA
Until June 5
The death in January of artist Hossein Valamanesh and the outbreak of war in Ukraine have restructured the viewpoint of this year’s Adelaide Biennial.
Curator Sebastian Goldspink is concerned with the between-worlds of 25 artists who can be considered displaced for whatever reason. And it is being held in South Australia, the Free/State of the title, where layers of indigenous and immigrant cultures have come to rest.
Surveys of art such as the Biennial are notorious for ending up with an amorphous mass of works of different quality but this exhibition represents Goldspink’s ideas with some cohesion. And the design, connecting the front gallery of the Elder Wing to the temporary exhibition spaces at the rear of the gallery with a series of splashy and extravagantly coloured paintings by Tom Polo, has ensured that the Biennial cannot be overlooked.
Hossein Valamanesh is among our most prominent artists and with his wife and collaborator, Port Pirie born Angela Valamanesh, has taken over an entire room of the gallery for the Biennial.
That is quite apart from Hossein’s works which are prominent on permanent display at the gallery.
He died suddenly as he and Angela were preparing the installation of their paired artworks.
Adelaide Festival director Neil Armfield has described the Valamanesh installation as a love story of a lifetime’s collaboration and it is well worth looking at it from that point of view.
Angela’s ceramic representations of organic forms have become increasingly imbued with meanings and histories making them precious objects.
Hossein’s works, in my memory, date back to his installations in the Parklands more than 40 years ago, when we asked ourselves why an Iranian artist was constructing buildings in the Persian tradition in the middle of our Victorian-era botanical splendour.
There are references to that history here in a kind of collector’s cabinet display of the Valamaneshes’ artworks.
It is indeed a love story.
But the revelation continues to be Hossein’s ability to extract profound beauty and inspire meditations in many media, whether it be bunches of red gum twigs, chairs, carborundum, calligraphy or the imprint of a human foot.
As you enter the gallery’s Elder Wing the first work of the Biennial is prominent. It is by the Ukrainian artist, Stanislava Pinchuk, born in Kharkiv, now the centre of a war-torn storm.
Pinchuk lives and works in Melbourne and her work about The Odyssey, The Wine Dark Sea, has 10 marble plinths engraved with text by a monumental mason.
They have all the permanence and polish of tombstones, but each consist of several different coloured and sized inscribed blocks, giving the feeling that they can be arranged at will.
The work is about the rewriting and censorship of history, presumably by the victors and is topical almost to the day. The inscriptions are from Homeric myth with “[REDACTED]” taking out parts or all of the quotes.
Tarnanthi, AGSA’s annual celebration of indigenous art, reverberates through this Biennial with many works showing how indigenous art is now such a major plank of contemporary Australian art.
Most in-your-face is Worimi man Dean Cross’s installation which literally stitches together the layers of European invasion, mapping and sensibilities. This imagery has overlaid our indigenous cultures and Cross has used wire to erect fence lines across the work which is secured by star droppers bent to look like wall-mounted museum displays of boomerangs.
Everywhere you look at the Biennial, cultures beg for recognition, and the arguments pull at your identity.
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