Visual Art
New artistic director Danni Zuvela’s first exhibition at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental is both a statement of intent and a renewal of vows. By Jennifer Mills.
Push/Pull welcomes a new era at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental
Where is a work of art? Even in a traditional gallery, it might be said to exist in experience, in the tensions between the artist’s expression and the viewer’s interpretation, and in the social contexts in which these take place. Push/Pull brings together an eclectic selection of mainly Adelaide-based artists working in live art, performance and experiential modes. It’s a field that has a long and storied presence in this city.
Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) was formed in 2017 from the merger of two small arts organisations with a rich history: the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia and the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF). ACE Open, as it was first called, took custody of a powerful avant-garde legacy. Dropping the “open” from the name in 2021, its identity has wavered between community and institution, sometimes coming under fire from artists frustrated with a perceived lack of local programming or opportunity for risk.
Push/Pull is artistic director Danni Zuvela’s first exhibition after more than a year of inherited programming and it comes as both a statement of intent and a renewal of vows. Along with guest curator Henry Wolff, Zuvela has gathered 40 artists working in interdisciplinary ways. “We are leaning into the E in our name,” Zuvela tells an appreciative crowd on opening night.
Push/Pull reflects a growing interest in returning to the archive and in shared, relational aspects of creative practice. Questions of connection, collaboration and mutual care are central.
The highlight of the physical program is Can Touch This, a tactile exhibition made for blind and low-vision artists. It’s a collaboration between artist Shan Michaels, emerging composer Antony Abbracciavento and the students at SASSVI (SA School and Services for Vision Impaired). Visitors follow Wayfinding devices (2025), created by the students, into the space. With their inviting textures, bright colours, crackles and bells, these devices reference both folk art and ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). A “mindfold” is offered to alter vision, and the installation can be experienced with a guide.
The feeling of hospitality is enhanced by vivid soft-sculpture self-portraits by SASSVI students. These muppet-like figures sit along one wall, setting out a site for play. A row of textured costumes, including capes and retrofitted-cat-cave helmets, complete the invitation.
The central installation consists of two hangings, one made from hot-pink builder’s line and another from multi-textured, toy-like “tubes”. These materials interact with Abbracciavento’s mesmerising three-part suite, each movement distinctively themed to the strings, tubes and costumes. Moving in and out of these tactile spaces affects sound and vision too, so three senses are heightened and disrupted at once. There’s a deliberate tension between the gleeful invitation to touch the artwork and a mild feeling of exclusion: as a non-blind person, this work is not really made for me. This decentring gently replicates the restricted experiences of blind and low-vision gallery-goers elsewhere.
With access and equity gains under attack across the world, the temptation must be to express anger or protest. Instead, this push/pull between invitation and design is calibrated to err on the side of fun. It’s a timely reminder that inclusion isn’t a zero-sum game. More often than not, access measures made for one group simply make things better and more enjoyable for everyone. The installation is designed for blind and low-vision people, but its transgressions will delight small children, touch-sensitive neurodivergent folk and serious contemporary art people alike. A commitment to audio description across the entire program multiplies this approach.
ACE has assembled an impressive line-up for the live program, most of which happens later this month. Over two days (May 23-24), Deeply Hanging Out promises workshops, performances and other experiences. Some events will be outside the gallery in public space, with a promise of braille activations. If some of this performance program appears unfixed, it adds an intriguing sense of formations assembling out of view.
For opening night, Jingwei Bu attempts to re-create a lost work from limited documentation recovered from the EAF archive. Only slides and undeveloped negatives survive of Pamela Gilbert’s Ritual Integration Performance (1976), which involved three hooded figures and a rope. Performed at the launch of their first major exhibition almost 50 years ago, it seems to have been both Gilbert’s first performance work and her last.
Ephemeral work always carries within it an element of grief, a loss that haunts women and queer artists in particular. The impossibility of this re-enactment makes for both reverence and absurdity, fertile ground for Bu’s ritual tensions. Bu’s practice, which has moved from writing and traditional Chinese charcoal drawing to durational and endurance work, investigates the possibilities of mark-making with the body, time and social ritual. The performance is accompanied by an essay by Alexandra Nitschke that gives context to the traces of Gilbert’s work. Two further retrieved performances are still to come as part of the She Also Performs project, commissioning contemporary responses to feminist live art histories.
Because of the focus on live and experiential work, the main gallery space is relatively spare, dominated by a large video projection from Noongar artist Patrick William Carter. In the foyer, lino-floor prints by Trudy Tandberg sit under two rusted, salvaged saws, describing the restoration of a regional studio. Work by local legends VNS Matrix peeps tantalisingly from behind a small velvet curtain. A row of pea sprouts grows in the window, care of Shenshen Zheng. All these are efforts to document, in consciously partial ways, a process of becoming: of a seed, a person, an art movement, a collectivity.
In the essay 1976-2025: Ritual Integration Performance, Nitschke quotes from audience responses to EAF’s first major exhibition: “some regarded it as ‘highly stimulating – a new force, the next step forward’ while others met the exhibition with ‘much bewilderment and despair’.” The live, post-object “happenings” at EAF must have been an astonishing countercultural disruption at a time when art meant paintings on walls, predominantly by men. Now, with an established tradition of experiential art that is older than this writer, the shock of the new has faded. Yet Push/Pull argues that meaningful interventions can still be made. Prominently, it emphasises a type of institutional methodology that supports experimental practice, creating the conditions in which artistic connections and possibilities might germinate.
By emphasising force and tension, Push/Pull evades a static centre, instead raising questions about what art does and who it is for. Here, the answer begins with an emphatic plural. In place of revelation, we’re given a glimpse of the joyful communities of practice that continue to emerge in this city, a living ecology of labour and friendship that is both connected to its unique history and embraces a more expansive future.
Push/Pull is showing at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental until June 28.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 17, 2025 as "Signature moves".
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