Within Reach
Image credit: ALEX GRANT, no fucks left to give, 2025. Calligraphic ink on absorbent ground, performance. Courtesy of Morgan Sette.
Adelaide Contemporary Experimental’s latest exhibition rejuvenates the rich lineages of post-object art in Adelaide.
Push / Pull at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) questions the boundaries of ‘visual’ art. This ambitious, multifaceted exhibition emphasises the significant lineage of performance practice in South Australia, including the seminal 1976 survey exhibition Post-Object Art Australia and New Zealand, A Survey at the Experimental Art Foundation (AEAF), which merged with the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA) to form ACE in 2017. However, the exhibition featured very few South Australian artists and only two works by women – Pam Gilbert and Kim Gray. Exhibition curator Danielle Zuvela states: “Most artists were from New South Wales and New Zealand, which is ironic for a show that made South Australia the ‘beating heart of the post-object movement’ internationally.” Push / Pull brings together reinterpreted performances from this exhibition and other key ’70s and ’80s performances in Adelaide, alongside new works, all by local artists.
Image credit: Push / Pull Blind Community Day. Courtesy of Andre Castellucci.
The two-month exhibition is punctuated by key moments of live performance, bringing women to the forefront of these activations. Jingwei Bu opened Push / Pull with her version of Gilbert’s Ritual Integration Performance. Other female voices emerged in the mid-exhibition performance program Deeply Hanging Out, including Yasemin Sabuncu’s reimagining of Anne Marsh’s 1980s Demand Your Right to Work performance, where she gave away bread in protest against elevated costs of living and Alycia Bennett’s audiovisual performance, which subverts the fetishization of women on the street in response to Jill Orr’s 1980s performance She Had Long Golden Hair. Sabuncu's and Bennett's new interpretations emphasise the ongoing relevance of these themes over time. Throughout the day, Sasha Grbich recreated Gray’s durational performance SWEATER, which involved cooking, grinding, and smearing ginger around the gallery, along with a variety of other performances, discussions, music, and food.
On opening night, Bu interconnected audience members and herself within a web of red rope and encircled their feet with white paint. The circles on the ground, the rope, and Bu’s white hooded costume remain in the space as fragments of the act, no longer effective as tools of confinement. Bu walked backwards during the performance, which she describes as returning to the past to honour Gilbert’s performance, as well as a call to rethink our actions and what true ‘progress’ means. “We claim advancement, yet we remain caught in cycles of violence, conquest, and division. My reverse movement is a protest against the illusion of forward motion – a reminder that we are, in many ways, walking backward as a species,” Bu shares.
Image credit: JINGWEI BU with collaborators Emily Tulloch and Adam Ritchie (sound) and Adele Siliuzas (costumes), 2025–1976: After Pam Gilbert, 2025, Performance. Courtesy of Lana Adams
Teleological conceptions of time fail to acknowledge the revisions and nonlinear paths that characterise the complexity of the creative process and life itself. Live performance further plays with timelines by creating heightened moments of awareness. Remnants from performances remain in the exhibition, giving subsequent visitors to Push / Pull a glimpse back in time to these fleeting periods of activity. Time spirals around, rather than offering a defined beginning and end, as different pasts return in the present. Additions to the exhibition after Deeply Hanging Out include two 70s tumble dryers activated by Stephen Atkinson in response to a 1974 Tim Burns performance, a t-shirt worn by Paul Gazzola during his spoken response to Bob Ramsay’s 1977 text work, a swear word in elegant black ink written over and over itself across a wall by Alex Grant, and large sheets of paper with words of longing for the deceased that a costumed Troy-Anthony Baylis lovingly planted with lipstick kisses. These fragments serve as a reminder of the messy, incomplete nature of live practice and the creative process, breaking down expectations of the gallery as a space for polished, perfect objects. Instead, the gallery becomes an active site for ideas to emerge through experimentation and play. The push and pull of performance allows creativity to emerge from the tension between the fluid dynamism of the live moment and fixed, predetermined parameters.
Other features of the exhibition engage with the Blind and Low Vision community (BLV), including playful Braille labels, Shan Michael’s tactile installation "Can Touch This," and soft sculptures created by BLV students. Zuvela shares, “There is a push and a pull between the dreams and claims for greater access and the name we have somehow agreed on for our sector, ‘visual’ art. If it's ‘visual’, isn't that automatically exclusionary? Our project with Can Touch This and our entire engagement with the blind and low vision community, which is quite rare in our sector, is part of a larger international movement towards ‘devisualising the museum’, which, for me, is about radical, multisensory acts of care. And access as a creative force.” These BLV exhibition elements expand our thinking about post-object art, as something unseen, but still with a physical form. Touch enlivens each object, offering its performative qualities that further question traditional ways we engage with objects in exhibition spaces. “I feel there's a tension between modes of engagement that centring blind and low vision spectators brings out – between the traditional, distanced mode of ‘Looking/Observing/Seeing/Possessing’ artwork versus the inclusive, embodied mode of ‘Experiencing/Feeling/Touching’,” Zuvela continues.
Image credit: ALYCIA BENNETT, CUNTY, 2025. Performance. Courtesy of Morgan Sette
The exhibition also features the program "Nature as Collaborator + Plant Swap," exploring performative collaborations with nature, including Shenshen Zheng’s experience working with peas in her slow-moving work, "Peas, Shoots and Leaves," which grows in the windows of ACE.Zheng’s project speaks to Push / Pull’s invitation to think beyond ourselves, contemplating our intertwinement with nature and its cycles, the different ways we engage with art, and through lineages of performance that have shaped the creative landscape we inhabit today.
Push / pull is at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) from May 3 to June 28, 2025.
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