Researcher and curator Sasha Grbich’s monumental project, The Experimental Art Anarchive, comprises three elements: the group exhibition Anarchive: Gut-feeling, which she co-curated with ACE artistic director Danni Zuvela at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE); her curation of Bridget Currie’s exhibition Anarchive: Knowledge follows form, at Flinders University Museum of Art (FUMA); and her guest editing of Artlink magazine’s edition 46:1, entitled Experimental Art – Rattling the Archive.
These exhibitions respond to FUMA’s archival records of experimental and post-object art and are complemented by the Artlink edition which comprises essays on experimental art and the collecting and archiving of exhibition records.
Grbich’s massive undertaking arose from her doctoral research into FUMA’s Post-object and Documentation Collection (POD) which is stated by FUMA to be “one of the most comprehensive national collections that documents conceptual art making in the 1960s and 1970s”.
The establishment in 1974 of the Experimental Art Foundation (later renamed the Australian Experimental Art Foundation) was a landmark event, and one of its co-founders, Professor Donald Brook, was then Chair of Fine Arts (later renamed Visual Arts) at Flinders University.
Brook, who initiated the establishment of the POD Collection that includes records of events at the EAF, questioned the definition of art and encouraged experimentation, leading to the widening of the field of art and precipitating vigorous public debates and even protests. The rejection of art as commodity was a central theme in many countries as well as Adelaide, and the nature of the debate in Adelaide greatly influenced local artistic practice and spawned a substantial legacy.
However, Grbich’s searching revealed that only five women and no First Nations artists were represented in the POD Collection, although many women artists of the 1970s and 1980s were involved in ground-breaking and nationally significant artistic and related protest movements. Some 300 women participated in an exhibition mounted by the Women’s Art Movement.
It was this glaring deficiency in the archive that inspired Grbich to devise her project — her idea of the ‘anarchive’ is to give voice to those absent from the archive.
Anarchive: Gut-feeling, ACE
The introduction to ACE’s exhibition catalogue states:
“Anarchive: Gut-feeling offers space in which to consider why and how we are carrying what we have picked up. It is also a response — like a shout released from the throat — a roar of indignation. We can see that women’s experimental art histories have not been carried carefully. We protest, we organise, we research; we archive.”
The introduction especially notes the artistic legacy of the EAF/AEAF (1974-2017, which was succeeded by ACE), the Women’s Art Movement (1976-1986) and the Progressive Art Movement (1974-1978), organisations which espoused divergent views, but which significantly influenced artistic practice in South Australia in varying ways.
V Barratt and Grace Marlow performing The teeth of time (crown) with sound by Andrea Illés
at Anarchive: Gut-feeling exhibition opening, ACE gallery, 8 May 2026.
Photo: Lana Adams @lanaadams
The ACE exhibition brings together newly commissioned artworks and artworks selected from the FUMA archive, encouraging dialogue across generations of artists. On opening night, renowned artist V Barratt and emerging artist Grace Marlow’s The teeth of time (crown) reprised elements of Barratt’s early performances and added new elements in a captivating and appropriately celebratory launching of the performance program.
The exhibition layout channels viewers through a space akin to the human body, and the walls of the ACE gallery are painted in the pink colour characteristic of human innards.
At the entrance, the audience hears Narungga artist Brad Darkson’s audio work My own identity after Reich (2026), a recording of his conversation with Barkindji artist, writer and curator Nici Cumpston acknowledging her role in passing on culture. He manipulated the recording using US composer Steve Reich’s innovative looping and phasing technique as exemplified in Reich’s Come Out (1966).
The exhibition includes A Moving Image Anarchive comprising videos of seminal performances, such as Sandra Greentree Nicolaides’s Up to our necks (1981) and Jill Orr’s She had long golden hair (1980), together with videos by Jacky Redgate, Sue Richter, Joan Grounds, Bronwyn Platten, Richard Larter and others. Margaret Dodd’s legendary This Woman is not a Car (1981) is a pivotal work. The Anarchive Slideshow, compiled by Grbich, displays photographic records of performances and installations by several women artists.
Juxtaposed with these is Troy-Anthony Baylis’s confronting and heartfelt The Mourning After (2026), which concerns his survival of the AIDS pandemic and his identity as a queer-Aboriginal descendent of the Stolen Generations.
Amongst the interactive elements is Kaurna, Narungga, Ngarindjeri artist Tikari Rigney’s Cubicle Confessional, comprising two adjacent toilet cubicles connected by a glory hole through which audience members can confidentially disclose their innermost thoughts to the artist. They can also leave graffiti on the walls. There are tactile works included to acknowledge vision-impaired audiences and foreground the importance of touch generally, a feature of previous ACE exhibitions.
Anarchive: Digesting the World, ACE
The ACE exhibition season included a day of talks and concurrent performances entitled Anarchive: Digesting the World, on 23 May. V Barratt spoke of their directorship of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (1989-91) and their involvement with the cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix (1991-1997) whose R-rated video Beg and Gen in the Bonding Booth (1993), sourced from the Griffith University collection, is discreetly on display. Barratt declared that their body is the archive of their work.
In her talk, FUMA director, Fiona Salmon, indicated that FUMA has had to argue for its very existence against possible funding reductions or closure; Artlink assistant editor Eleen Deprez spoke of the value of archives and noted how the parameters of archives define what is relevant, thus shaping contemporary culture; and Doris Poon, program director of Videotage, Hong Kong, outlined Videotage’s approach to the collection and safeguarding of media art. The talks emphasised the importance of maintaining independent, comprehensive collections that characterise cultural history regardless of political influence.
Jazmine Deng and Helium Liu conducted a series of intriguing performances, entitled Gutfeelings (simulacrumbs (we’ll be drilling holes)). Their endlessly creative and sometimes absurd interventions in the gallery space commented critically on aspects of contemporary art and illuminated the vast possibilities for experimental performance. Oriana Julie made profiteroles for the audience, stacking some of them onto her organic-looking ceramic sculptures, in her work entitled eat me (carcass).
Jingwei Bu, who has developed a unique oeuvre influenced by Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, held the audience spellbound with her Sipping Piece. Black-clad and blindfolded, she was led into the space holding a red rope pulled by Grbich and she sat on a stack of blank paper while slowly, meditatively sipping wine and tea by turns. Audience members refilled her cup and glass when empty.
Drawing on her mother’s knowledge, Shenshen Zheng made a Chinese cabbage dish in a traditional ceramic vessel using a slow fermentation method, in her The air will change, and she and her helpers made and served dumplings and sweets. Finally, disabled, First Nations, nonbinary Bedlam Rigney (AKA Cringetrender, pronouns: it/its) sang about its life in its Writing about Writing, Singing about Singing.
The ACE exhibition is much more than a display of artworks. It’s dynamic, relational, experimental and developmental, as has become the practice at ACE under Danni Zuvela’s visionary artistic directorship, and it brings together a diverse group of artists, acknowledging the gap identified by Grbich.
Anarchive: Knowledge follows form, FUMA
Dorothy (Dot) Thompson, Police talking to Budgie and Galah, 1977,
inkjet print on paper. Image courtesy of Dorothy and Gerald Thompson
Artist Bridget Currie’s exhibition, Anarchive: Knowledge follows form, curated at FUMA by Grbich, combines displays of work from the POD Collection and Currie’s own work, creating a conversation about artistic form and preservation and about the interpretation and significance of historical records.
The FUMA exhibition includes artists’ books displayed in vitrines, reproductions of artists’ photographic records and videos. A video shows Grbich and Currie examining and discussing the artist’s book All in the silence (1979) by Eva Yuen Man-Wah, while a nearby vitrine displays the book, exemplifying the process of interrogating and responding to selected holdings. Currie’s Unfolding Table (2025-2026), fabricated by metalworking artist Jennifer Matthews, also considers the process of archival maintenance and research.
Artists’ books by Jenny Boult (Can’t Help Dreaming playscript, 1982) and Dorothy Thompson (Who are the journalists of your mind? 1978), amongst others published by the EAF, are displayed together with Currie’s book Trees among people (2013), also held by FUMA.
Alison Goodwin’s artist book let’s make these walls where we live and work – Homes (1978) vividly illustrates the Bowden-Brompton Community Group’s occupation of a house designated for low-income single mothers.
There is a copy of an untitled text produced in 1978 by US artist Poppy Johnson, a member of the Guerrilla Art Action Group, during a performance in a New York gallery in which she wrote in three-hour shifts, recording her personal thoughts and feelings as a mother. The display is accompanied by an audio recording of Currie reading the text. As part of ACE’s Anarchive: Digesting the World program, Adelaide artist Aiden Hughes responded to Johnson’s performance by writing for three hours.
In consultation with Dorothy Thompson, Currie has recreated the budgerigar costumes worn by Thompson for performances and at protests in 1977. The exhibition includes an image of Currie wearing a costume and audience members are encouraged to try them on.
Bridget Currie’s Anarchive: Knowledge follows form is highly original, well researched and deeply thought-provoking. Grbich indicates that her consultation with women artists of the 1970s and 1980s “set off an avalanche of gifts to FUMA”, such as a copy of Bonita Ely’s Murray/Murrundi (1981) which is on display. Grbich’s research has expanded the FUMA archive in important ways.
Installation view, foreground: Bridget Currie, Knowledge follows form: Unfolding table, 2025–2026, Jennifer Mathews (fabricator); background: Bridget Currie, Dot pieces, 2025–26; Bonita Ely, The Murray River Project, 1977. Photo: Anna Fenech
Experimental Art – Rattling the archive, Artlink
In 1981, Artlink magazine was established to document the rapidly evolving art of this turbulent era and it thus forms part of the archive itself. Grbich states in her editorial that the double-length, companion edition, Experimental Art – rattling the archive, “offers open-ended discussions of experimental art, troubling history-making and resetting future-making: feeling forward with sensitive antennae.”
Amongst the many insightful essays, Danni Zuvela considers the concept of experimental art and art that caters to vision-impaired audiences; Anne Marsh discusses the revolutionary changes that flowed from the Women’s Art and Liberation movements of the 1970s; Gail Priest addresses the collecting and exhibiting of sound art; Melinda Rackham surveys artists’ responses to South Australia’s devastating algal bloom; Troy-Anthony Baylis reports on the Blak Laundry Project, and Brian Obiri-Asare writes on artists’ experimentation with artificial intelligence.
Artlink continues to record and critique artistic development and exhibition practice, ACE continues the EAF/AEAF’s experimental approach to exhibiting, and FUMA has extended its collection and engaged artists to evaluate its parameters for archiving and historiography. It might be anticipated that the gaps in the POD Collection will continue to be filled.
Sasha Grbich’s The Experimental Art Anarchive thus establishes a meta-analysis of the nature and legacy of experimental and conceptual art over the last half century and of related archiving and exhibition practices. Her linking of Flinders University, the EAF/AEAF and Artlink celebrates these organisations as the foundations of a distinctly South Australian and highly significant body of experimental and conceptual art.
Chris Reid
What: Anarchive: Knowledge follows form
When: 27 Apr to 19 Jun
Where: Flinders University Museum of Art
More info: https://www.flinders.edu.au/museum-of-art/exhibitions/anarchive-knowledge-follows-form
What: Anarchive: Gut-feeling
Where: 8 May to 27 Jun
Where: Adelaide Contemporary Experimental
More info: https://ace.gallery/whats-on/exhibitions/anarchive-gut-feeling
Experimental Art – Rattling the Archive, Artlink magazine, issue 46:1, 2026
More info: https://www.artlink.com.au
Jingwei Bu, Sipping Piece [performance development], 2026,
Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.
Photo: Andre Castellucci
