The 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian art marks 30 years of the festival. Over this period we have been lucky to experience the work of over 400 artists and 20 curators. It’s Australia’s longest running survey of Australian art.

In this new show, Monster Theatres, curator Leigh Robb explains that she has had the opportunity to work with living Australian artists to bring monsters to life.

‘Endurance performance, sound works, arenas for action, and listening take the stage in Monster Theatres. This exhibition creates encounters with agents of artificial intelligence, the chance to choreograph robots, or to rest and breathe with bees. Agency and power structures will be shifted and redistributed, materialities mutate and morph.’

And Monster Theatres does this. It’s an exhibition for our time, where things are starting to feel as if they’re falling apart.

In her opening address, Rhana Devenport, director of AGSA, describes the Biennial as ‘urgent, powerful, and beautiful’, and I couldn’t summarise it better. This exhibition is everything art can and should be.

Running through till June and spreading across the whole of AGSA and the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, the Biennial is starting with a big Vernissage Weekend, which includes live performances and talks with many of the artists. Check out the schedule here and don’t miss the exhibits in the Botanic Gardens!