Next year’s Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art will be all about pressure, with curator Ellie Buttrose revealing the name and lineup for her 2026 program, entitled Yield Strength.

The biennial marks a kind of homecoming for Buttrose, who was born in Adelaide before her family moved away while she was still a toddler.

“There’s so few opportunities for a curator to be given carte blanche,” Buttrose says.

Currently the Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Buttrose says the biennial’s name and theme emerged gradually as she travelled around the country meeting with the 24 artists on her roster.

“That was actually one of the reasons that I wanted to do the show,” she says. “You get the opportunity to spend time in studios, and that’s how I develop my projects – I don’t go with the idea and ask artists to respond to it. It was about spending time in studios and then seeing what were the common ideas that artists were bringing to the fore.”

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What came through, she says, was an embrace of physicality and materiality following the detachment of the pandemic era.

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“One of the joys of being in the art museum is actually looking at something physical and material,” she says. “That sense of pushing materials and layering materials comes across in quite a lot of the artists; you have this sense of pushing paint or applying paint in different ways, or people are using sculpture in different ways.

“I think there is this moment after Covid where artists are investing in ‘time spent’. Artists are spending time with their materials, and pushing their materials and pushing that aesthetic experience of the materiality of art, but also how that has wider implications. The push and pull of the social comes through as a metaphor in the way that you push and pull with materials.”

"The push and pull of the social comes through as a metaphor in the way that you push and pull with materials."

Perhaps the most recognisable name on the running sheet is Archie Moore, the Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist whose giant chalk family tree, Kith and Kin, won the Golden Lion at last year’s prestigious Venice Biennale — with Buttrose as curator. It will be his second Adelaide exhibition since the Venice win, following the late 2024 run of Dwelling, which saw a replica of Moore’s childhood home erected inside Samstag Museum of Art.

“It was exciting for us to continue that relationship — we have worked together previously even before Venice,” Buttrose says. “I mean, the thing is, he just had a great idea. And of course that’s something I wanted to support.”

The biennial will sweep across the country, from Milminyina Dhamarrandji – born in the community of Wirrwawuy on the Gove Peninsula in far northeastern North Territory – to Sydney via Samoa performance artist Brian Fuata. Closer to home, the program also includes Adelaide-based photographer Emmaline Zanelli, sculptor Jennifer Matthews, and Pitjantjatjara artist Josina Pumani, who won the Telstra Emerging Artist Award at the 2024 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.

“I think that’s one of the great things about the Adelaide Biennial, is that often it’s artists whose name you maybe know, who are working in new ways,” Buttrose reflects. “But then also it launches careers; there’s lots of names who may not be as familiar, but hopefully once [audiences] see the impact of their work at the Adelaide Biennial then they’ll become more recognisable artists in people’s minds.”

The 2026 Adelaide Biennial will run from February 27 to June 8, with the primary exhibition at AGSA supplemented by partnering venues including Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Botanic Garden. The biennial announcement is the latest glimpse of the 2026 Adelaide Festival program, which last week revealed its major theatre headliner, Robert Wilson’s Mary Said What She Said, and French Baroque group Ensemble Pygmalion.

2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art lineup

Robert Andrew
Nathan Beard
Lauren Burrow
Francis Carmody
Mark Maurangi Carrol
Milminyina Dhamarrandji
Matthew Teapot Djipurrtjun
George Egerton-Warburton
Prudence Flint
Brian Fuata
d harding
Matthew Harris
Helen Johnson
Kirtika Kain
Jennifer Mathews
Archie Moore
Josina Pumani
Julie Nangala Robertson
Erika Scott
Joel Sherwood Spring
Charlie Sofo
John Spiteri
Isadora Vaughan
Emmaline Zanelli