JESSE JONES: TREMBLE, TREMBLE
Friday 26 February — Thursday 1 April 2021

Irish artist Jesse Jones’ multi-media installation work Tremble, Tremble derives its title from a slogan chanted at Italian feminist marches in the 1970s that called for access to abortion and wages for housework. First staged at the Venice Biennale in 2017, in this iteration—and its Australian premiere—Jones summons a feminist phantasm combining a giant from Irish folklore and the figure of a witch to form her own mythological giantess, who reads 'In Utera Gigantae'—the artist's fictional law that proclaims a new social order from a female perspective. Jones has collaborated with actor Olwen Fouéré and sound artist Susan Stenger to create a work of art that extends through the gallery as an expanded form of cinema.

Tremble, Tremble was originally commissioned by Tessa Giblin and Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council of Ireland for the Pavilion of Ireland at the 57th Venice Biennale. Sound design and composition by Susan Stenger. Production management and AV programming by Aaron Kelly.

Image: Jesse JONES, Tremble, Tremble, 2017, performance, courtesy the artist.

JAMES TYLOR: THE DARKNESS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
26 February — 1 April 2021

The Darkness of Enlightenment calls into focus the mistakes, mistranslations and loss of knowledge resulting from European colonist processes in documenting Kaurna culture.

Drawn from his series From an Untouched Landscape, Tylor displays eighteen photographs captured on Kaurna land. Accompanying these are thirty Kaurna objects as made by Tylor according to historical records and two sound works by Koorie artist Anna Liebzeit; one capturing Kaurna language and music by the artist and Jack Buckskin, the other drawn from conversations with Kaurna elders involved in the revival and continuation of the Kaurna language and culture.

Within 2021 Adelaide//International, The Darkness of Enlightenment is a remembrance and action, recognising the powerful role recording our present holds in shaping our future.

Image: James TYLOR, (Vanished Scenes) From an Untouched Landscape #6, 2018, Inkjet print on void, 25 x 25 cm.

FAYEN D’EVIE: Endnote: the ethical handling of empty spaces
26 February — 1 April 2021

Fayen d’Evie’s Endnote: The Ethical Handling of Empty Spaces considers how we might write language for posthuman audiences. Recognising the environmental and social urgencies of the world we have created, d’Evie engages in acts of speculative publishing by embedding fragments of stories in granite and sound. Her messages are performed, touched, and sensed, and stem from an experience of blindness; together, her sculptural installation calls attention to the value to our shared future of acknowledging difference, and each other.

Performance ~ Friday 19 March & Saturday 20 March
Over two days, dancer and choreographer Benjamin Hancock performs an essay written in movement, playing with the shape of letterforms and grammar, testing the potential of conveying the meaning and emotive content of a message through the body. These durational performances begin at 10am each day.

Developed by Fayen d'Evie with Sofia Lo Bianco, Bryan Phillips, Benjamin Hancock, Anna Seymour, Vincent Chan, and Trent Walter.

Image: Fayen d’Evie, study for Endnote: The Ethical Handling of Empty Spaces , 2020, courtesy the artist.

TALOI HAVINI: TSOMI WAN-BEL
26 February — 1 April 2021

Taloi Havini’s video work Tsomi wan-bel (win-win) is a meditation on systems of justice, through the representation of a traditional mediation ceremony in Northern Bougainville, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville.

Practiced across the Pacific, this customary approach to reconciliation and restorative justice brings victims and offenders together and is practiced alongside common law.

In Havini’s three-channel moving image work, audiences observe a ceremony that facilitates the admitting of offence or wrongdoing. We see, through the shared rituals, the necessity of all parties (mediator, victim and offender) to gather in expression of regret and to present offerings as a means of making amends. We see also the witnessing and celebration of this healing by the wider community, though the ceremony itself is never shown on screen.

Image: Taloi HAVINI, Tsomi wan-bel (still), 2017, 3 channel video, 9.42 mins.

ALEX MARTINIS ROE: TO BECOME TWO
Friday 23 April – Friday 24 September 2021

In 2021, Samstag Scholar Alex Martinis Roe brings her expansive exhibition To Become Two to Samstag. Since 2014, Martinis Roe has been tracing feminist genealogies and the emergence of feminist political practices in Western Europe and Australia in the 1970s and ‘80s; from France to Italy and Spain, to Australia and the Netherlands. Across six film installations, Martinis Roe narrates histories specific to their locations, the communities and their stories selected for their interconnections and their distinctive practices, which developed the concept ‘sexual difference’ and the current field of ‘feminist new materialism,’ exploring this social history of ideas and the forms of political action that both come from and underpin it.

Adopting video as her aesthetic medium and utilising its capacity to play with the structure of time, Martinis Roe tells these histories using archival footage, contemporary documentation and oral history interviews. Martinis Roe will offer a workshop that engages a younger generation with the tools and political practices that emerged from the historically important collectives she worked with, thinking through how they might be useful for us today.

Image: Alex MARTNIS ROE, To Become Two, installation view, The Showroom, London, 2017. Exhibition design: Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga. Photo credit: Daniel Brooke.

JAMES NGUYEN & VICTORIA PHAM: RE:SOUNDING
Friday 23 April — Friday 17 July 2021

Encompassing performance, installation and the possibilities of the digital realm, RE:SOUNDING explores one cultural object’s changing meanings over time and across cultures.

The sound of the Đông Sơn drum is pivotal to the Vietnamese sense of identity, resonating across two millennia of religion, war, exile and return. Vietnamese-Australian artists James Nguyen and Victoria Pham have created a multi-faceted project exploring the Đông Sơn drum from all angles: as a spiritual object, cultural icon, token of trade and instrument of warfare. In two exclusive streamed performances, master percussionists will tease out the nuances of this fascinating instrument and invite audiences to discover the diasporic stories of displacement and create their own songs from a library of digitised interactive sounds.

RE:SOUNDING activates the sonic cultural past of one community and reimagines it into the contemporary now, inviting visitors to participate in digital experiments and music creation.

Samstag Scholar Nguyen is an artist working in Naarm Melbourne, who has exhibited across Europe, the US and the Asia Pacific. Pham is a sound composer, archaeologist and artist who specialises in archaeoacoustics, working between London, Sydney and Paris.

MADISON BYCROFT: BIOPIC or CHARLES GENEVIÈVE LOUIS AUGUSTE ANDRÉ TIMOTHEE
Friday 16 October — Friday 24 September 2021

Working between Marseille and Adelaide, Samstag Scholar Madison Bycroft’s compelling practice produces fantastical, fully realised experiences of sculpture, film and performance. Expanding the act of translation to consider interpretation and representation, Bycroft is concerned with empathy – how can we convey the plurality of existences in a system fixated on definition? Theirs is work that is dense with references to the mythological, the philosophical and pop culture.

BIOPIC or Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée  is a serialized film orbiting the life of eighteenth century French diplomat, spy, Freemason and soldier Chevalier D’eon, filmed across Tonerre, Marseille and South Australia and incorporating animation, puppetry and live action. While situated within the genre of the biopic, the film’s structure embraces the idea that truths are contextual and contingent on perspective, politics, experience and the story-telling capacity of the narrator, by employing misrecognition, excription and disnarration as poetic devices. Touching on the edges yet never fully revealing the character of Chevalier D’eon, Bycroft’s work reflects the process and (im)possibility of representing the fullness of a life lived by its own direction.

Created through the South Australian Film Corporation and SALA Festival’s second Artist in Residence commission.

Image: Madison BYCROFT, Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée, still, 2021. Courtesy the artist.

SODA_JERK: HELLO DANKNESS
15 October — 17 December 2021

The world is undergoing seismic cultural transformation. How we understand ourselves and our relationship to others has been irrevocably rocked, and at the epicentre of this disturbance is the internet. How did a technology that gifted us LOL Cats become most closely associated with the rise of alt-right extremism, civic surveillance, the darknet, the death of democracy and the annihilation of fact-based journalism? Whatever happened to that brave new world of free data, shared culture, and radical new forms of activism? Hello Dankness is the two-person art collective Soda Jerk’s incisive critique of the social and political milieu of our times.

Merging documentary impulse with cinematic narrative—and constructed entirely with the artefacts of screen culture—, Hello Dankness takes the form of a cyberpunk thriller that runs riot through dystopian sci-fi, hacker documentaries, supernatural Hong Kong horror, French New Wave, 70s political thrillers, internet instructional VHS tapes, Japanese anime, Russian spy films, online microcultures, dank memes, and the blockbuster musicals of the 80s and 90s.

Commissioned in partnership with the Adelaide Film Festival, this highly anticipated work will be accompanied by a concise selection of Soda Jerk’s oeuvre spanning the past 17 years, and a publication with Perimeter Books.

Image: SODA_JERK, Hello Dankness, film still, 2020.