I entered an exhibition about North Terrace on North Terrace, and saw the precinct anew
- Written by Sasha Grbich, Undertaking a PhD in Art History, Flinders University
North Terrace: worlds in relief, currently showing at the Samstag Museum of Art, offers visitors the chance to travel to different worlds while walking down the same street.
Curator Jasmin Stephens brings together contemporary artists from South Australia, New South Wales and Singapore who respond to the North Terrace cultural precinct in conversation with the work of Narungga poet and researcher Natalie Harkin.
The artists offer visitors to the exhibition the chance to see this precinct of colonial civic, cultural and military buildings from different perspectives, some in stark relief to the cultural story of imperial progress for which it was originally constructed.
‘World’-travelling
Being open to the experience of another can lead to a shared culture of appreciating difference. Philosopher and activist Maria Lugones developed the term “world”-travelling to describe the importance of stepping beyond one’s own cultural and social view.
Lugones also understood the difficulty of visiting a new place. She suggests those undertaking “world”-travelling go with loving intentions, an openness to surprise and a willingness to change.
The spirit of Lugones’ respectful exchange is evident in the approaches taken by the artists who offer the opportunity to experience the cultural precinct anew via listening, thinking with plants and animals, and by sitting with difficult truths.
To experience North Terrace with Natalie Harkin’s poem Cultural Precinct (2014) is to come to know this place as a Kaurna campsite.
Among other insights, her writing makes visible the violence against Aboriginal people that happened at the Armory (in its cells, morgue and gallows) and brings to light the South Australian Museum’s role as a keeper of racialised hierarchies and human remains.
Harkin’s poem holds a central position within the exhibition where it is reproduced in full.
The strangely familiar
Entering the Samstag’s upper galleries I wander through the strangely familiar colonnades of gated@remunerated#obliterated by the ArtHitects (artist Gary Carsley, architect Renjie Teoh).
Their monumental street art style paste-up remixes the North Terrace environs. The result is disorienting. I am not sure if I am travelling into a more cosmopolitan future or have stumbled into a mistranslation of the present – of the kind AI might pull together.
Pieces of Teoh’s !MingMing! plywood furniture are casually placed beside the print offering the chance to linger within this disquieting world.
An opening in the ArtHitects’ façade leads to Allison Chhorn’s Dissolve the Walls, where video follows North Terrace building surfaces.
North Terrace: worlds in relief, installation view, Samstag Museum of Art, 2025.
Photography by Sia Duff courtesy Samstag Museum of Art
Filmed close to the stones, the tactile images dissolve into a colour that is like the red inside a closed eyelid. Time ebbs and flows in the accompanying dreamlike soundscape where passing cars mix with echoes of what seem to be past or future lives.
Listening is offered as an immersive way to reshape understandings of this complex place.
Order and chance
For her series of works, Louise Haselton heads to the exclusively male zone of The Adelaide Club. Starting outside, she looks down at the feet of the few statues of women in the vicinity of North Terrace.
Her drawings, made using rubbings of the statutes’ toes, amplify their presence as well as their tentative gestures.
North Terrace: worlds in relief, installation view, Samstag Museum of Art, 2025.
Photography by Sia Duff courtesy Samstag Museum of Art
Turning her attention to the menu from a lavish 1913 dinner, Haselton arranges cast-bronze asparagus spears as if a recalcitrant child had pushed them around a plate into the shape of a house.
Historically the food of kings (and quite phallic), asparagus proves the perfect vegetable for pointing out the arrogance of men shaping culture while devouring a luxurious meal.
Andrew Burrell takes us on Miner’s Journey, where we travel with Miner (a bird) and their friends Pelican, Wind and River through an open work which includes a video and anarchic online collection
North Terrace: worlds in relief, installation view, Samstag Museum of Art, 2025.
Photography by Sia Duff courtesy Samstag Museum of Art
Burrell employs a wild form of storytelling fuelled by chance (the magic of tarot cards) and prompted by a noisy miner bird looking for a lost perch. Humans take a back seat to stones, plants and environmental forces. The work offers an alternative to the more ordered archives that can be found along the cultural precinct.
After time spent immersed in the thoughtful travel of the exhibition, I step out of the gallery and directly onto North Terrace. This project affirms the power of art to unsettle dominant histories from within the very cultural precinct in question.
North Terrace: worlds in relief is at the Samstag Museum, Adelaide, until September 26.
Authors: Sasha Grbich, Undertaking a PhD in Art History, Flinders University
