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If you haven’t been to Adelaide’s Museum of Economic Botany before, Archie Moore’s new work might easily seem like it’s always been there. Set among the dark wood cabinets filled with seeds and tools and notebooks is a new display of eclectic objects, all telling the story of one man: Stanley Moore, Archie’s father.
“There was an obvious connection between my father and gold – he thought he’d discovered this deposit on the land where he grew up and worked on,” Moore explains. “He’d mention it now and again – it was kind of like a hope or a promise of a better future.”
The small collection of objects and documents is, at first glance, eclectic. A map and a document copied in thin sheets of gold, complete with folds and creases. A sprig of leaves that are partially rendered in copper and gold. A life-size human heart in what looks like solid gold. And, in a glass cabinet of its own, what looks like an old bucket almost filled to the brim with a yellow liquid.
“He used to keep a bucket next to his bed that he’d urinate in, and it’d be full in the morning,” Moore explains. “Unknown to me and maybe him – because he never went to the doctor – but that’s an early symptom of prostate cancer.”
It makes for an interesting companion to his Gold Lion-winning work Kith and Kin which was shown at the 2024 Venice Biennale. While Kith and Kin takes a step back, looking at Moore’s family tree, Remnants Of My Father (2025) steps forward, with full focus on one man.
While Stanley never ended up finding the gold deposits he spoke of, this exhibition and these objects, Moore explains, are “trying to realise his dream in a way”.
Moore is one of the 24 artists whose work is currently on display as part of the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Curated by Ellie Buttrose (who also curated Kith and Kin), this year’s incarnation carries the name and theme Yield Strength, with work scattered across three locations in Adelaide’s CBD.
Counter-intuitively, this splitting of the work over different places is one of the Biennial’s strengths – while some artists’ work can only be found in one place, others have works spread out across the city. While the bulk of Moore’s are in the Botanic Gardens, smaller works that nod to the full display can be found elsewhere.
Pairs of paintings by Melbourne artist Prudence Flint are displayed across two venues. On the lower floor of AGSA, we stand in front of The Cut (2023) and The Coat (2022). The works, Flint explains, were chosen by Buttrose, as were the pairings – something that has caused Flint to see her own work in a new light.
Flint’s paintings grow more surreal the longer you look at them. “That painting started with her head on the side table,” she says, pointing to The Cut. In it a woman with long plaits sits on the edge of a bed. Behind her is an open music case, and tossed on the floor in front is an open pair of scissors. On the table, where once her head was, instead is a wedge of watermelon. “It’s a process,” Flint explains. “I will work on it for a few months.” After “her head went back on where it belonged” the table then housed a vase of flowers and a shell – “and then the watermelon just held”.
While The Cut has been previously displayed, The Coat, outside of an art fair, “never got shown properly”. In it, a woman looks into a mirror, while in the foreground a naked man stands with his hand on a chair. Flint hasn’t painted a man since. “Whenever I put a man in a painting, it always creates a lot of response and weird comments, and it always does my head in,” she explains. “It’s either you know, I’ve made his genitals too pink or too big or too small. You don’t get these comments about the women.”
She pauses. “There’s a whole history of men painting women. They can have endless women models,” she says, and reflects that no one asks questions about them. “But a woman paints a man, and everyone wants to know who he is.”
Kirtika Kain’s works blending gold, tar and hessian can be found at both Samstag Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of South Australia. Nathan Beard’s realistic renderings of his own hands and feet that gently nudge into body horror are also split over the two locations.
The relationship between an artwork and the space in which it is displayed is integral to several of the works. Yard by Jennifer Mathews forces visitors to make a choice on how to navigate the exhibition by splitting an entrance-way into two different paths, temporarily flickering the gallery into farmland and visitors into livestock. Wise-to-the-bait: Preparation by Francis Carmody sees a closed gallery door roped off, while light peeks out under a narrow gap.
Around every corner and along every wall is something that will challenge you, will push you into feeling something, will make you look at the ordinary in a new way.
When I walk into one room a woman behind me exclaims “that looks like a pile of garbage”. While this is one of the top three annoying phrases you’ll often overhear at a contemporary art exhibition (alongside “What’s that supposed to be?” and “I could do that”) she’s right, actually. It’s supposed to. We’re both standing in front of Erika Scott’s work Necrorealist Sunscreen (2026), which is made up of discarded man-made garbage. Lamps and office chairs and broken computers and toys and fake plants and mass-produced trinkets melt into one another to form a lumbering, monstrous mass, serving as a pointed reminder of the legacy of plastic and junk being left not just to this generation but to the next.
Elizabeth Flux travelled to Adelaide as a guest of AGSA.
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