​Disclosures: a season of artists' projects sponsored by the Samstag Program / 14 September 2003 — 6 April 2004


Image: Nicholas Folland, Disclosures Project 6: heave away!, site specific performance, 18 April 2004, Torrens River, Adelaide. Image courtesy Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia Australia. 

The Samstag Program’s Disclosures series of exhibitions was an innovation both for the Samstag Program itself and for art in South Australia. The Samstag Program invited six former Scholarship recipients – Deborah Paauwe, Glenys Hodgeman, Angela Valamanesh, Paul Hoban, Darren Siwes and Nick Folland – to make a temporary artwork, or show an artwork for a short period, in novel locations in and around the city of Adelaide. The Disclosures events took place at approximately monthly intervals over the period September 2003 to April 2004, one of the events coinciding with Artists’ Week in the Adelaide Festival of Arts. The brief for the artists was to make a temporary, public work that would be on show for just a few hours on a predetermined day. In most cases, public notification of the event was by way of an email message or printed invitation that was sent to a few selected individuals, who might then pass on the message to friends and colleagues. The invitation indicated the artist and the title of the work, the time of exhibition and the location of the work, where necessary supplying a map.

Invitees rendezvoused as if for a secret meeting, unsure of who or what they would encounter. Once there, the form of the event was not unlike an exhibition opening, with refreshments laid on. After a few hours, the crowd dispersed, the artwork was packed up (or, in one case, disappeared by itself) and the event thereafter remained only in memory and in the documentary collection of those who had brought cameras.

Catalogue essay by Chris Reid.

 

Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia, acknowledges the Kaurna people as traditional custodians of the land upon which the Museum stands.