Announced today (3 September) the theme for the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art is Yield Strength.
Curator Ellie Buttrose – who was responsible for curating Australia’s Golden Lion winning pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year – said that she is interested in ‘what it means to transform materials, to yield to them, and not be able to go backwards.’
Buttrose has chosen 24 artists to explore her theme, among them Archie Moore, who she took to Venice.
The exhibition will be presented at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) from 27 February to 8 June 2026 as part of the 2026 Adelaide Festival.
In this story:
Ellie Buttrose on understanding ‘Yield strength’
Buttrose explains simply: ‘Yield Strength will reveal how materials, selfhood and society are tested – and transformed – under pressure.’
The word yield in itself has a duplicity of meaning. ‘It’ll be played on in different ways in the show,’ Buttrose tells ArtsHub. ‘What I liked about Yield strength, is that it does have a meaning as a phrase, but then also it could be played upon in different ways. And, I think one of the strengths of Australian art is the diversity of practice.’
She is interested in how artists push their material boundaries, and how we bodily experience intimacy and intellectual wonder through artworks – to perhaps yield to our own thresholds or expectations in the gallery space.
Buttrose is interested in how artists use their ‘mediums to build visual complexity, or contort them to convey the curious side of existence.’ She describes her list of artists as ‘not the usual list’, adding that her Biennial will play off ‘surprising combinations.’
She continues: ‘Not everyone will have their own room – because I think that’s kind of speaking within a bubble – but there’ll be a few artists who appear a couple of times in different spaces across the three venues, and you’ll see them in relation to different artists, and that will make you think about their work differently.’
In line with past editions, Yield strength will extend beyond AGSA to partner venues Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Botanic Garden.
Yield to an analog wonder of material in a digital world
In speaking with ArtsHub with Ellie Buttrose about her theme, she recognises there is a kind of renaissance around material practice at the moment.
‘Definitely, that’s something I saw when I was going to studios,’ says Buttrose. ‘Normally with my projects, I don’t go out with an idea for artists to respond to. They’re very much driven by spending time in studios and artists run spaces or art centers or commercial galleries, and trying to think what are the common threads that I’m seeing throughout practices.’
AGSA Director Jason Smith adds that Buttrose’s 2026 Adelaide Biennial will offer ‘a captivating and thought-provoking Biennial that underscores the wonder of the “real” in an increasingly virtual world.’
Buttrose tells ArtsHub that it is not a deliberate ‘push back’ to our spiraling digital world – to celebrate the analog – but is just about ‘enjoying things in and of themselves. It’s not like we’re giving up technology, or I’m not spending less time on my phone or less time at the movies, but when I go to an art gallery, I want to see something that I can’t see elsewhere. I think that’s the difference.
‘What I was really drawn to, is that a lot of artists are trying to build complexity into their work and retain many things at once, and whether that’s aesthetic complexity, like Milminyina (Dhamarrandji) 10,000 strokes on her paintings, or whether it’s Erika Scott’s vast installations that have a physical layering of Objects, or John Spiteri’s way of layering paint in different ways, and trying to build that into the project itself.’
She continues, ‘Their depictions range from intimate bonds between family to human-animal connections, and more complex, dynamic relations between people and the world they inhabit, to propose new ways of being. Artists in the exhibition seek to capture how these connections, regardless of scale, have the power to transform the self.’
Ellie Buttrose reveals the artists in her 2026 Adelaide Biennale
- 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
The Adelaide Biennale is the country’s longest-running survey of contemporary Australian art. Over is history it has presented the work of over 500 artists, experienced by more than 1.8 million visitors. Ellie Buttrose is Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and was the curator of kith and kin by Archie Moore in the Australia Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.
ArtsHub spoke with Ellie Buttrose as she was installing kith and kin this week at QAGOMA, it opens 27 September.
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