Artistic universe unravels in Adelaide

With the Adelaide Festival coming up between 2 and 18 March, now is the perfect chance to explore the visual arts. Drawing on the broader themes of the festival – faith, emotion, mystery and universe – Into Cosmos reflects on how art is engaged in the making of cosmology. Referring to the sphere of imaginary possibilities and the systems that situate us in the world, cosmos is a discussion that charts the finite and infinite.

For a week during Adelaide Festival, imaginative thinkers and artists will descend on the South Australian capital for Artists’ Week, a forum for exchanging international and national perspectives on the most paramount issues shaping contemporary art.

Fri 2 March - The Presentness of Utopias
Art history attempts to characterise the bonds between cosmologies and artistic practice. The comprehension of contemporary art again questions the spirit of things and existing in an open world. This day of Artists’ Week commences with an examination of the presentness of utopia and living with faith without assuredness.

Opening Keynote: Jan Verwoert
One of the great thinkers of contemporary art, Berlin‐based critic Jan Verwoert, is heading to Adelaide to open Artists’ Week. Having written widely about the current state of artistic practice as a contributor to magazines such as Frieze, Afterall and Metropolis M, Verwoert is well established within the artistic community. Currently teaching at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, his recent book is titled Tell Me What You Want, What You Really Really Want (2010).

Sat 3 March - The Geography of the Imagination
In art, place matters, yet very few artists confine their imagination to the spaces that they live, or the places they’re from. On the second day, the tension between forms that reflect universal appeal and the specificity of local knowledge are focused on in an attempt to clarify how we establish ourselves in the world and through creative process.

Keynote: Cuauhtémoc Medina
Mexico City-based art critic, curator and historian Cuauhtémoc Medina is a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the National University of Mexico and was the first Associate Curator of Latin American Art Collections at Tate Gallery, UK. A long-term collaborator of artist Francis Alÿs, he has curated and published extensively on his work. He is the curator of the forthcoming Manifesta9.

Sun 4 March - Ambient Images
Our society is so defined by images that is seems impossible to imagine the world through anything but a series of competing images. This conflict is also apparent in competing media. This part of the schedule questions the critical function of the image in the realm of social media and an increasingly ubiquitous visual culture.

Keynote: Hou Hanru
A prolific writer and curator, Hou Hanrou is Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the San Francisco Art Institute. He curated the Istanbul Biennial (2007) and the Lyon Biennial (2009) and is one of the first curators and thinkers to examine postmodern issues of nomadic identity, hybridity, globalised mobility, what he calls "in‐betweeness" and artists living in the diaspora.

Mon 5 March - Spectres of the Abyss and the Horror of the Void
Since the beginning of time, the mysterious other side of this world has always inspired fear and excitement. Where the infinite and emptiness are most powerfully felt, this final day concludes the Artists’ Week by exploring notions of the abyss and its inspiration to the imagination.

Keynote: Barbara Creed
Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, Barbara Creed has spoken and published widely in the area of film and visual cultures. Her books include The Monstrous‐ Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993) and Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny (2005). Her current areas of research are animals and the emotions, and the cinema of human rights.

Closing keynote: Paul Carter
Acclaimed author, artist and interdisciplinary scholar Paul Carter is the Professor of Creative Place Research, Deakin University, Melbourne. Interested in turbulences in human and non‐human systems, his work includes public art works, installations and radiophonic works and books including Ground Truthing (2010), Dark Writing (2008) and Material Thinking (2004).

WHERE
Adelaide Festival Theatre
WHEN
Fri 2 March
TICKETS
Free

WORKSHOPS
Artists’ Week again offers a series of exciting workshops giving emerging artists an exclusive opportunity to work alongside and learn from selected international guests of the visual arts program. Limited places are available for the workshops taking place in February and March 2012.
Details: adelaidefestival.com.au