The 2026 Adelaide Biennial, titled Yield Strength, requires slow looking and quiet consideration
- Written by Catherine Speck, Emerita Professor, Art History and Curatorship, Adelaide University
These are troubled and changing times – a view of the zeitgeist that permeates Yield Strength, the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art.
The stresses and anxieties navigated on a daily basis include political extremism, challenges to social cohesion, ecological collapse, the enduring effects of colonialism, and social and economic inequality.
Yield strength is also a technical term. Taken from engineering, yield strength refers to the maximum stress a material can withstand before starting to break down.
But as the exhibition’s curator Ellie Buttrose explains in the accompanying exhibition catalogue,
metaphorically yield strength exemplifies how an awareness of another set of thresholds is forced upon us by political and environmental crises – of the finiteness of the world we inhabit and our physical and emotional capacities to respond. Fostering futures from this altered vantage point requires an understanding of the pressures that shape this moment, a respect for breaking points and a resourceful approach to alternatives.
The 24 artists in the exhibition have ambitiously taken up the challenge of considering alternative futures and working with threshold points in materials. They use a range of media from steel to digital technologies to painting.
Slow looking
Pitjantjatjara artist Josina Pumani’s rough-hewn ceramic vessels including Black Mist (2025). Their charcoal exterior and lurid red-hot interior, or vice versa, refer to the devastation wrought on Aboriginal people and their Country from 1952–63 from the British Government’s nuclear testing program.
This colonial indignity is close to her heart: her grandfather witnessed the black smoke from the atomic explosions. Pumani’s vessels, fired at 1,200 degrees, transform the clay into a hard matter symbolic of the enduring ruination of Country from radioactive fallout, and mimic somewhat the extreme heat of the fireballs released at Maralinga.
One aspect that stands out in Buttrose’s curation is her co-location of artworks. Pumani’s vessels, at the Art Gallery of South Australia, are framed by the meditative and finely dotted acrylic paintings of Walpiri artist Julie Nangala Robertson in Mina Mina Jukurrpa (2025).
The lineal mark-making depicting the contours of Country are aerial maps of ancestral land. Its netting patterns present a new style of depicting every aspect of life, travel and ceremony.
Innovation and change continues with Yolŋu artist Milminyina Dhamarrandji. Her paintings employ clan designs for which she is the senior custodian.
These intricate designs are magnified on a large digital screen at the Samstag Museum, complete with the death adder weaving in and out, all of which sit behind her painted burial poles. Old and new are one.
Dhamarrandji, whose bark paintings are also on show at the Art Gallery, works from the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre which hosts the ground-breaking digital media Mulka project.
Jennifer Mathews presents a very different future. Her beautifully constructed and interconnected stainless-steel corridors respond to the spatial pathway viewers take through a gallery space, and lead to smaller-scale exhibits.
Aptly titled Yard (2025), the work is based on the concept of a sheep run, and is an architectural form of containment. It mirrors the artist’s interest in institutional power structures, how bodies are controlled and how much free will do we have. Big questions indeed.
Thai-Australian artist Nathan Beard injects some humour and sexual tension into possible futures in his fantasy-filled surrealistic exploration of the human body in Ciceroni (2025). Truncated latex arms and fingers extend, embracing and caressing objects ranging from Thai-Buddhist sculptures to luscious fruits.
Installation view: 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength, featuring Ciceroni by Nathan Beard, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
Photo: Saul Steed
Erika Scott takes aim at the throw-away nature of high-tech and low-tech household and garden materials in contemporary times in her over-the-top environmental horror installation Necrorealist Sunscreen (2026). It touches a nerve in all of us.
In a different vein, Wiradjuri artist Joel Sherwood Spring’s chilling video and installation Diggermode 2, Cloud Ceding (2025), traces a genealogy of control from the colonial to the digital era, including the physical and environmental costs of global data storage and cloud computing.
Quiet consideration
An exhibition is only ever an ephemeral event. The permanent record lies in the exhibition catalogue.
This year the catalogue has been produced in magazine format because magazines, like biennials, respond to a specific moment. The problem is the limited shelf life of a magazine. This is compounded by the fussy focus on the text’s font and poor page layout.
Quality has been traded for a street vibe. While the rationale is understandable, the magazine format does a disservice to the engaging text and long-term memory of a timely exploration of some big issues.
Installation view: 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength, featuring Chronicles II by Kirtika Kain, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
Photo: Saul Steed
The focus of experimenting with materials to find threshold points has led to stand-out work such as Kirtika Kain’s deeply etched and fragile copper panels, Chronicles 11 (2025) that are transformed into lurid green and russet mobiles.
The solidity once intrinsic to copper has been transformed into a form replete with vulnerability.
The rhythm of threading artists’ work through three exhibition sites, often with provocative pairings, makes for good viewing. This includes the unspoken moments in Prudence Flint’s muted paintings of semi-clad women in interiors set opposite the loud and riotous display of Erika Scott’s junk assemblage.
Yield Strength requires slow looking and quiet consideration.
The 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art is at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Samstag Museum and the Adelaide Botanic Gardens until June 8.
Authors: Catherine Speck, Emerita Professor, Art History and Curatorship, Adelaide University
