While it’s hard to imagine events outside of the prolific SALA festival, OTR is here to remind you there is always more – but not before highlighting some festival favourites. (Image: Aston Hawkins-Nicholls via Nexus Arts)
By Anisha Pillarisetty | @nishkinsilk
August, like most other months this year, has been heralded by the haunting sounds of the economy creaking under the weight of the nation’s ever-elusive fiscal debt; and, once again, low to middle-income earners are doing most of the heavy lifting.
But, as noted in last month’s edition, Adelaide artists continue to chip away and OTR’s brief monthly guide of local projects is trying its hardest to keep up – which is especially tricky with the prolific South Australian Living Arts (SALA) Festival in full swing.
The largest open-access visual arts festival in the world, SALA will showcase nearly 12,000 artists across 648 events throughout the month of August.
To make it a bit less daunting, OTR journalist Sophie Holder has put together some festival highlights on Instagram, but it’s hard not to mention a few more.
Visual Art/Film
Last month’s edition briefly introduced this year’s SALA feature artist, Mark Valenzuela, whose solo show Still Tied to a Tree is showing at the Adelaide Central Gallery. You can also find Valenzuela’s work at the Art Gallery of South Australia until the end of the month.
Tours are a great way to find your bearing – and this year artists Elyas Alavi and Jingwei Bu are running separate walking art tours through the CBD, as part of SALA, in Farsi and Mandarin respectively.
Bu and Alavi are also both featured in SALA group show Reading Between. Highlighting local contemporary artists’ use of language as a medium as well as a tool to generate dialogue, the show is, fittingly, displayed at the Adelaide City Library.
And that’s not all from these artists.
Alavi is showing work alongside Louise Haselton and Kate O’Boyle as part of After the Fall at Flinders University Museum of Art, and has also curated group exhibition TIMELESS at the Kerry Packer Civic Gallery. Featuring a range of local and international contemporary artists working across various media, TIMELESS is centred around themes of memory, migration, identity and body.
Just down the road, Bu’s Pouring Tea Until It Is All Evaporated (a finalist in multiple SALA awards) will be accompanied by an artist performance and conversation at Nexus Arts on August 13, beginning at 12.30pm.
And while in the area, head over to the northern side of the Guildhouse building for Brad Darkson’s Unceded Seeded (Ngampa), produced in consultation with Ngangki Burka Senior Kaurna woman Lynette Crocker.
Talks, performances and workshops
On the other side of the coin, if you are looking to launch your own creative project and need help developing those grant writing skills, Helpmann Academy and Carclew are running a workshop on the evening of August 11.
Why stop there? Transform the tangles of social media into a useful tool for promoting and expanding your creative practice with Helpmann Academy’s webinar. Led by head of marketing at Freerange Future, Alicia Wakeling, the one-hour Zoom session will be held at 5pm on August 17.
And the best part of both these events? Registrations are free for students and creatives (within five years of graduating from their final year of study) from a number of programs across South Australian universities. The grant-writing workshop is also open to all South Australian creatives who are 26 or under.
The Unbound Collective and Dominic Guerrera were recently in conversation about their collaborative project REFLECT, which features various Kaurna collaborators. The immersive exhibit can be viewed until November as part of MOD.’s Invisibility exhibition. Better yet, sign up for the AUSLAN-interpreted exhibition tour, running from 12-1pm on August 13.
If the array of SALA events isn’t enough, National Science Week will be kicking off on August 13, with activities ranging from a film festival and a light art trail, to learning about fungi’s role in native grasslands and increasing biodiversity in Dry Creek Linear Park.
Despite SALA wrapping up at the end of this month, next month’s edition is already filling up with creative delights. Until then, stay tuned, safe and inspired and look out for each other!
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