Isaac Julien  / 2022 Adelaide Festival
4 MARCH – 27 MAY 2022

An exhibition of works by Isaac Julien, an internationally acclaimed UK artist and filmmaker with career links to Australia, presented concurrently for the 2022 Adelaide and Perth Festivals. Julien is world-renowned for arresting works that bring together baroque pageantry and metaphor.

Based in London and California, Isaac Julien (CBE RA) is recognised for his screen film installations and photographs incorporating different artistic disciplines, including dance, photography, drawing and sculpture. Informed by his film background, Julien's art installations form fractured narratives that critically reflect on themes such as identity, history, globalisation and social representation.

Samstag will present the Australian premiere of Julien's installation 'A Marvellous Entanglement' (2019), which pays tribute to significant Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi.

For the Perth Festival, Curtin University’s John Curtin Gallery will present the premiere of Julien's installation 'Lessons of the Hour' (2019), a meditation on the life and times of Frederick Douglass. Both venues will feature the multi-screen work 'Ten Thousand Waves' (2010), a poetically evocative weaving together of stories drawn from China's ancient past and the present,  inspired by the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004.

Image:  Isaac Julien, Green Screen Goddess (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010, Endura Ultra photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

HELEN FULLER / KHAI LIEW / 2022 Adelaide Festival
4 MARCH  – 27 MAY 2022

Samstag is proud to present new work by Helen Fuller with the ambitious exhibition design of Khai Liew. 

Over a long and extensive career, Fuller has established an accomplished multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, sculpture, installation and in recent years, ceramics. Materially driven, she approaches ceramics in a manner she likens to painting, centred about characteristics of form rather than the function of the vessel. Developed for the Adelaide Festival, Fuller’s new body of work will see a series of hand-built terracotta objects exploring connections to geological and social time, and the object as a cultural and anthropological artefact.

Fuller has exhibited widely throughout her career, including exhibitions at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation; Adelaide, Queensland Art Gallery; Brisbane, and the Australian National Gallery; Canberra. Her work has been acquired by collections including Artbank, Sydney; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Australian National Gallery, Canberra and the National Gallery of Victoria; Melbourne. Fuller completed a Master of Visual Art at the University of South Australia in 1994.

Image: Helen Fuller, pots, 2021, photo Grant Hancock

DANIEL JABER / 2022 Adelaide Festival
5 MARCH 2022, 10am—5pm

Over a seven-hour period Daniel Jaber’s Rite brings together contemporary dance, improvisation, living sculpture and installation in a study of the efforts of suppression and the weight of carrying guilt and shame.  Rite is the first of a trilogy of daring new works by Jaber, premiering at Samstag in 2022. Together, they occupy a critically interesting position, and a burgeoning area of cross-artform making; not dance in response to visual art, nor simply dance presented in a gallery, but interrogations of degradation, decay and renewal occupying a nexus of the visual and the physical.

Daniel worked as a company dancer at Australian Dance Theatre for 17 years (2004-2021), during which time he toured world extensively. In 2013 he created ‘Nought’, which was commissioned by ADT and premiered at the Samstag Museum of Art in Adelaide. ‘Nought’ was nominated for a Helpmann Award for Best Choreography in a Dance or Physical Theatre work and won numerous accolades in the 2013 Dance Australia Critics Circle Awards.

Image: Daniel Jaber, 2021, photo by Sam Hall. Courtesy the artist