Samstag Museum of Art. 27 Jul 2025

 

The Samstag Museum of Art’s exhibition, North Terrace: worlds in relief, was inspired by a contribution to the online arts magazine Fine Print’s ninth edition (2016), entitled Nations. Fine Print’s editors had seen the need for First Nations writers and artists to be heard, and they invited several such artists and writers to contribute.

 

The contribution that prompted this exhibition was the 2014 poem Cultural Precinct by Narungga woman, activist-poet and Flinders University academic and researcher, Dr Natalie Harkin. The poem has been printed onto the gallery wall for the exhibition and the other artists in this exhibition responded to it.

 

North Terrace in Tarntanya/ Adelaide’s CBD is the location of universities, the Elder Conservatorium of Music, the South Australian Museum, the State Library of South Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Samstag Museum of Art itself and is known as its cultural precinct. Harkin’s Cultural Precinct is a powerful statement identifying North Terrace as the symbol of the colonisation of Kaurna Yarta, the lands of the Kaurna people. Her poem begins:

 

these limestone walls   frame institutions of power   shape the

‘main story’   this colonial ‘free’ State  /   these North Terrace

Statues   bronzed famous faces   symbols of colonialism

Empire-revered…

 

Exhibition curator Jasmin Stephens has brought together artists fromSouth Australia, New South Wales and Singapore to “respond to the city’s environs and the world views that they convey”.

 

Allison Chhorn, Dissolve the Walls, 2025, single-channel video, 4-channel audio, 20:30.

Still from moving image. Courtesy the artist.

 

Adelaide-based Cambodian-Australian artist Allison Chhorn’s haunting video and sound installation, entitled Dissolve the Walls, was developed in consultation with cultural consultant and storyteller Uncle Mickey Kumatpi O’Brien, of Kaurna/ Narungga descent. It shows a sequence of images that fade into each other, including a red brick wall and a stone wall that signify colonial occupancy, and imagery suggesting flowing water—the Karrawirra Parri/ River Torrens.

 

The video’s soundtrack includes the noise of North Terrace traffic, birdsong, flowing water and a voiceover describing traditional Kaurna practices. Chhorn describes her mapping of the precinct’s material and sonic character and its history as “sonic archaeology” and her work as “de-colonial listening”, and it offers an insightful appreciation of the district and its traditional culture.

 

North Terrace: worlds in relief, installation view of ArtHitect’s gated@remunerated#obliterated (North Terrace Adelaide), Samstag Museum of Art, 2025. Photograph by Sia Duff.

 

The ArtHitects is a duo comprising artist Gary Carsley and architect Renjie Teoh who work between Bathurst (NSW) and Singapore. Their gated@remunerated#obliterated (North Terrace Adelaide), comprises 483 overlapping colour photocopies pasted onto the entire wall at the top of the stairs leading to the upper level of the Samstag gallery and continuing into the gallery.

 

The image, which has a three-dimensional feel, shows the typical gates and fences that enclose the spaces occupied by the colonists and which transplant English urban culture onto the colonised land. Behind the fences and gates are native trees chosen for retention to create a garden effect. Sitting before this scene is a plywood stool of Chinese design which invites viewers to occupy the space that the image subtends.

 

The work’s positioning invites viewers to imagine they are overlooking North Terrace. By masking the gallery wall with a depiction of colonial architecture, this work invites reflection on the way in which architecture establishes cultural identity and the ownership of territory.

 

North Terrace: worlds in relief, installation view showing Louise Haselton’s The food of gentlemen; we eat; round and round up and down; and The feet of ladies (Venere di Canova), The feet of ladies, Dame Roma Mitchell, and The feet of ladies, Pioneer Woman, Samstag Museum of Art, 2025. Photograph by Sia Duff.

 

Adelaide artist Louise Haselton looks at colonial culture through the symbolism of its artefacts. Included in her extensive installation is her The food of gentlemen, which depicts the menu for the golden jubilee dinner of the venerable men-only institution, the Adelaide Club, which was founded in 1863. She also displays a copy of E. J. R. Morgan’s book The Adelaide Club, 1863-1963, from which the menu was quoted.

 

To balance the story, Haselton’s The feet of ladies (Venere di Canova), The feet of ladies, Dame Roma Mitchell, and The feet of ladies, Pioneer Woman, represent the feet of three symbolically significant statues displayed along North Terrace. Erected by the colonists in 1892, the statue of the Venus of Canova was Adelaide’s first public street statue and introduced classical aesthetics and the idea of privately funded public sculpture to Adelaide. The ArtHitects also include a representation of the Venus of Canova in their installation.

 

In her work, Haselton uses rubbings on metallic paper, bronze casting, hessian, steel nails and lead, as if adverting to the harsh, industrial materiality of colonisation.

 

Andrew Burrell, Miner’s Journey, 2025, single-channel video, audio, 14:00. Still from moving image. Courtesy the artist.

 

Sydney-based (Gadigal Country) artist Andrew Burrell’s contribution comprises a video entitled Miner’s Journey and a screen-based webpage entitled (an)archive: Miner’s Journey. The video presents an allegorical story of the journey of a noisy miner, the ubiquitous Australian native bird, to find stone quarried from its home in the Adelaide Hills and used in North Terrace buildings. The character of the bird and its story are told through voiceover, text and a sequence of tarot cards bearing the images of birds including the miner, and the story suggests that change is inevitable.

 

The (an)archive: Miner’s Journey webpage, which was evidently created with the aid of artificial intelligence, identifies source material for the story, including for example a report that a noisy miner had to be removed from the Art Gallery of South Australia in case it damaged artworks.

 

It may seem odd that this exhibition was produced in the Samstag Museum of Art, a significant cultural institution whose presence results from and potentially reinforces the very colonisation to which Natalie Harkin refers.

 

Harkin’s research involves the interrogation of archival material concerning First Nations communities and the decolonisation of cultural institutions. She is a member of the Unbound Collective of First Nations artist-academics at Flinders University whose webpage states that, “their individual and collective work centres on ethical practice and responsibility, using memory and storytelling to critically engage with colonial sites of power and knowledge production, such as universities, galleries, libraries, archives and museums.”

In mounting this exhibition, the Samstag Museum of Art may thus be seen to support the decolonisation process.

As the editors of Fine Print indicated in the introduction to their ninth edition, “one of the most radical and urgent acts is that of listening”. North Terrace: worlds in relief invites viewers to study the precinct and think about what it means to them, and again to listen to the voices of First Nations peoples.

 

Chris Reid

 

When: 20 June – 26 September 2025

Where: Samstag Museum of Art

More info: https://unisa.edu.au/connect/samstag-museum/exhibitions/2025/north-terrace/

Natalie Harkin’s poem Cultural Precinct can be seen here.

 

 

 

 

North Terrace: worlds in relief

Installation view showing Natalie Harkin’s Cultural Precinct

Samstag Museum of Art, 2025

Photograph by Sia Duff