Art Gallery of South Australia, Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Botanical Gardens. 12 Mar 2026
The title of the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Yield Strength, is a technical term for the point at which a material gives way under pressure. Biennial curator Ellie Buttrose says in the exhibition catalogue that “Yield Strength is an exhibition about limits.” In these troubling political, economic and environmental times, our strength and resilience as a society is being stressed to breaking point.
The Adelaide Biennial is a crucially important survey of Australian art that fosters new and experimental art, and Buttrose has provided the 24 artists with ample space at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Samstag Museum of Art, and the Adelaide Botanical Gardens for them to develop and display their work.
Many exhibits are large, complex and immersive, inviting extended contemplation, and the colocation of works creates illuminating juxtapositions of form, concept and subject matter. Some artists are exhibited in more than one gallery to extend the possibilities for comparison, and thematic links between many works thus emerge.
Installation view, Yield Strength: 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Samstag Museum of Art, showing work by Isadora Vaughan, foreground, and left to right in background: John Spiteri, Josina Pumani, Kirtika Kain and Matthew Teapot Djipurrtjun; photo: Chris Reid
Kamilaroi and Bigambul artist Archie Moore, who won the Golden Lion award at the 2024 Venice Biennale, has created a portrait of his father, Stanley, entitled Remnants of My Father, that fills the temporary exhibition space at the Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanical Gardens.
The portrait comprises artefacts which characterise his father biographically, for example his World War II medals, a notice advertising his services as an excavation contractor, and his miner’s license. He was an amateur gold digger hoping to make it rich, and the exhibit includes a gold replica of a human heart, entitled Heart of Gold. The many elements are displayed as if for museological study and preservation, and for memorialisation.
Archie Moore, Heart of Gold, Yield Strength: 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art,
Museum of Economic Botany, photo: Chris Reid
Moore’s portrait is of a man of unfulfilled ambitions, a “battler” who never gave up hope. Encouragingly, the exhibit demonstrates the family’s resilience and, implicitly, the ongoing capacity for resilience of working-class people and people with First Nations ancestry. It may also be seen as a self-portrait of Moore as an artist and as a son coming to terms with his origins and upbringing in rural Queensland.
On entering the underground level of AGSA, viewers are greeted by Yawuru artist Robert Andrew’s dramatic electromechanical work, New eyes–old Country–Nagula, that occupies an entire wall. It comprises a video screen mounted on a track that slowly moves back and forth horizontally along the length of the wall. Attached to the armature are pieces of charcoal that leave black lines on the wall, so that the work is a drawing machine. The video screen shows aerial views of his Yaruwu Country, so his Country is leaving traces on the wall.
Andrew’s work involves new technologies and languages of display, moving beyond the traditional depiction of Country in paint on canvas, such as Walpiri artist Julie Nangala Robertson’s finely crafted and quite mesmerising paintings entitled Mina Mina Jukurrpa. Yolŋu artist Milminyina Dhamarrandji and Gandarrŋu Malibirr artist Matthew Teapot Djipurrtjun have also combined video with installation in their life-affirming works that concern Country and Dreaming.
Most conspicuous in the AGSA display are Jennifer Mathews’ two steel installations, Yard and Ramp, which function architecturally in that they channel viewers through the AGSA space like sheep. Yard and Ramp mimic the structures used in managing livestock, and the scale and indestructability of these beautifully finished showpieces of metal fabrication force viewers to consider the ways in which human society is confined and managed by its own systems.
Installation view, Jennifer Mathews, Yard, Yield Strength: 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art,
Art Gallery of South Australia, photo: Chris Reid
Her interventions in the gallery space influence viewers’ perceptions of the entire display. As Canberra artist and curator Oscar Capezio says in the catalogue, “Jennifer Mathews’s steel forms stand at the tipping point at which empathy hardens into exploitation and labour becomes ritual.”
Wiradjuri artist Joel Sherwood-Spring’s Diggermode 2: Cloud Ceding comprises two videos and an extensive installation that includes aluminium fencing, a nineteenth century land surveyor’s measuring chain, and equipment used for seeding clouds to cause rainfall, all of which are seen as devices for the enclosure and control of Country. The videos address the subdivision of land for private ownership and the use of data centres and artificial intelligence to mediate our daily existence. Like Mathews, Sherwood-Spring addresses the systems of control that we impose on ourselves. But Country was never ceded and implicitly it can’t be.
Emmaline Zanelli’s absorbing and exquisitely photographed 10-minute video Pocket Money comprises brief biographies of young people beginning their working lives in mundane jobs, a moment in their lives which is a rite of passage to adulthood and to a lifetime of working for a living—for survival—in an exploitative commercial environment. Zanelli offers intimate glimpses of these youngsters in the private spaces of their bedrooms as they display the consumer goods they have purchased.
In her catalogue essay, art historian and critic Tara Heffernan compares Zanelli’s work with Erika Scott’s mountainous and densely stacked pile of discarded plastic consumer goods, entitled Necrorealist Sunscreen, which evokes an overfilled landfill site, the legacy of contemporary life. Scott’s enigmatic assemblage is carefully constructed, and some items are inserted into others, for example, plastic toys emerge from the seats of office chairs.
The purchases cherished by the young workers in Zanelli’s Pocket Money will inevitably end up as waste but in the meantime, they reveal their owners’ tastes and interests, giving them comfort and identity as they embark on life’s journey. Both artists’ works advert to the fetishisation of consumer goods.
Erika Scott, Necrorealist Sunscreen detail, Yield Strength: 2026 Adelaide Biennial
of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, photo: Chris Reid
The 200-page exhibition catalogue comprises illuminating essays by curators and academics and statements by the artists. Some essays, described as viewpoints, read like personal responses, and others, described as texts, read as critiques. Artist Brian Fuata teasingly reveals little in his emails with writer Aodhan Madden.
Viewpoints, texts and images of works are interspersed through the catalogue, creating further juxtapositions and establishing a conversational approach that considers each artist and their work from multiple angles, enriching the possibilities for interpretation and appreciation. It can be clumsy to navigate but it’s rewarding.
All the artworks are of the highest standard of finish and conceptual resolution, and the thoughtful arrangement in the gallery spaces encourages extended engagement. Although a superficial viewing might induce a feeling of despondency, the creation of these works enables both artist and viewer to consider the world and its troubles in a detached and objective manner.
Curator Ellie Buttrose suggests that identifying yielding points may inform alternative states and thus provide a vantage point for the future. Understanding our weaknesses enables us to adapt. Implicitly or explicitly, the artists identify what we might lose and how we value what we have, and we viewers must extrapolate these ideas to plan a future.
Chris Reid
When: 27 Feb to 8 June
Where: Art Gallery of South Australia, the Samstag Museum of Art and the Adelaide Botanical Gardens
More Info: agsa.sa.gov.au
Installation view, Jennifer Mathews, Yard,
Yield Strength: 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art,
Art Gallery of South Australia, photo: Chris Reid
