Friday 7 June—Friday 20 September 2024
Tuesday—Saturday, 10am—5pm

All Welcome
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Mulka Yata/The Knowledge of Place

Samstag Galleries 1 and 3

Featuring Kristian Coulthard, Clem Coulthard, Ted Coulthard and Winnie Ryan (Adnyamathanha) with Sasha Grbich / Antony Hamilton / Kyoko Hashimoto and Guy Keulemans / John R Walker / Music performance and sculpture by Dylan Crismani and Christopher Crismani (Wiradjuri/European) / Film featuring Kristian Coulthard by Malcolm McKinnon and Jared Thomas.

Dating back to the Earth’s earliest continent formation, known as the Adelaide Geosyncline, this mountainous region was established hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs roamed. It contains the Warratyi rock shelter, the oldest known site of human habitation on the continent and the ancestral home to the Adnyamathanha people for the past 50,000 years.

This group exhibition presents new work alongside historic material, transcribing a place through sculpture, sound, painting and video. Mulka Yata/The Knowledge of Place illuminates the ancient landscapes, histories and peoples encompassing the Ikara-Flinders Ranges region of South Australia, proposing an historically layered, geological and cross-cultural conception of place.

A Samstag Museum of Art exhibition with the South Australian Museum, curated by Erica Green, Samstag, and Jared Thomas (Nukunu), South Australian Museum.

FX Harsono: NAMA (Indonesia)

Samstag Gallery 2

FX Harsono is one of Indonesia’s most revered contemporary artists. In 1975, he was among a group of young artists who founded Indonesia’s Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement), which emphasised an experimental, conceptual approach, the use of everyday materials, and engagement with social and political issues. During Indonesia’s dictatorial Suharto regime
(1967-98), Harsono’s installation and performance works were powerfully eloquent acts of protest against an oppressive state apparatus.

In NAMA (“names” in Indonesian), he focuses on Chinese Indonesian personal names and their function as both markers of identity and symbols of remembrance. The exhibition centres on a video in which Chinese names are recited as a litany and then replaced with Indonesian names. Through looking into his own past, Harsono has touched on concerns that resonate globally, foregrounding fundamental issues that are central to the formation of group and personal identities in our rapidly changing world.