Bubble Worlds, 2018 Adelaide Biennial

We live in bubbles we’re told. Not the benign soapy kind but filter bubbles, echo chambers of the like minded, served up our own views, reinforcement of the ‘more of what you like’ kind fed by algorithms, news (real and click bait fake), social media, Russian troll accounts and the like. Difference becomes danger. Solipsism in extremis.

Of course we’ve always lived in bubbles of one kind or another, but it seems now that these are more impervious, able to be weaponised by causes, organisations and individuals without our consent. Living in a schismatic world where difference is usually constructed as both binary and necessarily adversarial, meaningful connections and bonds across difference seem more difficult and critical than ever. To live with difference means a stepping beyond these safe and sealed bubble worlds.

The 2018 Adelaide Biennial, Divided Worlds, belying the complexities and troubles alluded to in its title seeks to counter these schisms with a survey coalescing around ideas of difference, strength and diversity. Curator, Erica Green summarises her approach as: ‘…rather than foretelling conflict, my focus has been on …an exhibition that celebrates the enduring role of art and culture. Divided Worlds offers an opportunity to experience an alternative dimension- one where ‘difference’ is the natural order of things, and a strength to be celebrated’.

Moving past the somewhat problematic characterisation difference as ‘natural’, what is on show here is a remarkably various selection of works and worlds realised in sculpture, video, photography, glass, ceramics, assemblage and painting. Each of these worlds is individually reaching toward internal order and unity but markedly not toward each other. This lack of connection between these discrete worlds is one that remains botheringly at the heart of the show and detracts in the end, from its strength and resonance.

There is nothing overtly controversial, noisy or confrontational here, no ‘star’ works; rather the mood is egalitarian and reflective. Few works are overtly political and these are the quieter ones, Vernon Ah Kee’s world wall I Witness, is a statement of identity and persistence, as Khaled Sabsabi’s modest hand painted postcards of ruined Beirut, 99 Names are a reclamation of riven space and memory.

2.

Julie Gough’s installation of video and colonial notebook larngerner: The Colour of Country is unflinching and tender as her work so often is. Gough has reclaimed a colonial notebook of explorer Norman B Tindale from the South Australian Museum and sets it against a book-like two screen video installation of her denuded country. The notebook page shows a square of painted brown, a guide to the ‘true’ colour of indigenous skin for white incomers. The camera moves slowly through country against this colonial classification and in this action Gough removes her people from the anthropological in a symbolic restitution to country. Other works with political intent are less successful, Emily Floyd’s large installation Icelandic Puffins that spells out the names of the individuals responsible for Iceland’s financial fiasco is glossily attractive but without detailed knowledge, critically empty.

There is in these worlds: inclusion, exclusion, radical otherness, strangeness, expansive worlds and worlds that seem almost hermetically sealed against entry. Roy Ananda’s imposing game world bringing the virtual into timber and paint is physically impressive and a spectacular entrance to the gallery. While it seems to hum with its own contained energy, it doesn’t easily invite entry to those ignorant of the rules. So too Pip and Pop’s fluorescent sugar grotto tantalises but keeps its borders secure. Inaccessible to those without insider knowledge, they have all the glamour and allure of the unknown and unattainable. Against these sealed spaces, Patrick Pound’s The Point of Everything, an eclectic agglomeration of objects around the idea of the point of and pointing, drags everything, references, allusions, tangible objects and intangible concepts, towards itself vortex like. Also the monumental and expansive work of the Ken Sisters and the looping starry imagery of Daniel Boyd embodies the generosity and interconnectedness of their indigenous worlds without end.

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The pull towards unity and order that underlies much of this show, finds itself in many works in nature. In Amos Gebhart’s four screen video installation Evanescence, the divisions of bodily difference, age, gender, and colour are arrayed against elemental landscapes of salt lake, waterfall, desert and rock formation. In ritualistic choreography this physical diversity aims to undo ideas of the normative body but falls into the trap of positing the body as the primary source of truth. Focussing only on superficial visual differences, the lived difference of these individuals bodies outside of the normative simply doesn’t’ come through here.

Tamara Dean’s photographic series In Our Nature (2018) places the human cycle of life against the seasons and longer cycles of nature in the nude body within nature, photographing people within the Adelaide and Mt Lofty Botanic gardens through the seasons. With its immersion of bodies in nature, it is located perfectly within the fecund multiplicity and modest grandeur of the Museum of Economic Botany. For me, those images with amateur models are less studied and the most arresting, the Sacred Lotus (Nelumbo lucifers) series with lotus and feral youth in particular.