To coincide with the 2008 South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival, the Samstag Museum has invited Timothy Morrell, a nationally renowned Brisbane-based visual arts professional with strong links to South Australia, to produce an exhibition that examines South Australian art practice from the independent viewpoint of a national perspective.

South Australia's picture of itself is often distinctly at odds with the state's optimistic and rational origins as a free settlement. Justified or not, local mythology is inclined to present a darker and more perverse environment, a place of bizarre murders and threatened survival, clinging precariously to the edge of a desert. For many South Australian artists, the popular notion of their home as a strange and rather 'uneasy' place has encouraged them to make work that is closely attuned to the sense of global insecurity that has marked the early years of this century.

This exhibition is intended to observe the responses of South Australian artists to feelings of unease, and to allow their particular circumstances to reflect the world in microcosm.

Uneasy will be the first exhibition in many years that ambitiously surveys recent South Australian art, and acknowledges some of our leading and newest contemporary artists. Selected artists include Daryl Austin, John Barbour, Annette Bezor, Matthew Bradley, Annabelle Collett, Tracy Cornish, Sarah crowEST, Nici Cumpston, Fiona Hall, Ariel Hassan, Aldo Iacobelli, Michelle Nikou, Yhonnie Scarce, Deborah Sleeman and Hossein Valamanesh.

Curator: Timothy Morrell

Exhibition catalogue

Media release