Two complementary exhibitions have been announced for the Kudlila (‘winter’ in Kaurna) program at Adelaide’s Samstag Museum of Art.
Recent sculptural examples of German-born, Adelaide-based Frank Bauer’s cross-disciplinary practice will be celebrated in the major exhibition Frank Bauer, while the second level of the Samstag gallery features the group exhibition, North Terrace: worlds in relief.
Bauer, a former lecturer at the University of South Australia’s School of Design, has exhibited in Europe and Australia during his 45-year career. His practice embraces design, jewellery, silversmithing and fine art, and his works are held in major museums around the world, including London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Berlin’s Bauhaus Archive, the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), the National Gallery of Victoria and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
The exhibition Frank Bauer focuses on the sculptural aspects of Bauer’s practice and features metal and light works that consider matters of movement, longevity, repetition and change – both in an artist’s long career and, more broadly, in our everyday lives.
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The second level of the Samstag gallery is showing the group exhibition: North Terrace: worlds in relief, curated by independent curator Jasmin Stephens.
Widely touted as the city’s ‘cultural boulevard’, North Terrace – home to colonial institutions such as AGSA, the South Australian Museum and State Library of South Australia – represents a location of dispossession and resilience, and is emblematic of Tarntanya/Adelaide’s founding on Kaurna Yarta (Kaurna Country).
The exhibition begins with Narungga poet/activist Natalie Harkin’s 2014 poem ‘Cultural Precinct’, an exploration of Aboriginal resistance and colonialism, which laments how ‘red-kangaroo stories’ have been ‘ripped from the ground’.
Harkin’s poem – which originally appeared in her 2014 Flinders University PhD – was subsequently published in Unbound Collective’s exhibition catalogue, Bound and Unbound: Sovereign Acts II (2015). It was also published in Cordite Poetry Review (2016), Best Australian Poems (2016) and in fineprint issue 9 (November 2016), where it can be read online. The poem also appeared in the first of Harkin’s three-part publication, Colonial Archive (2019).
The artists featured in North Terrace: worlds in relief include Andrew Burrell (Sydney), Allison Chhorn (Adelaide), Louise Haselton (Adelaide) and the ArtHitects (Gary Carsley, Bathurst, NSW and Renjie Teoh, Singapore) in addition to Harkin. Their new works reference North Terrace’s contested histories through sculpture, moving image and design.
The exhibition also draws on the collection of UniSA’s Architecture Museum.
A Kudlila season launch event will be held on Thursday 19 June from 5-7pm, with opening remarks delivered by architect Karl Fender OAM, co-founder of Fender Katsalidis and AFK Studios. Associate Professor Carolyn Barnes from Swinburne University of Technology will be writing a catalogue essay for Frank Bauer which will be available online.
Frank Bauer and North Terrace: worlds in relief open to the public from 20 June to 26 September 2025 at the Samstag Museum of Art, 55 North Terrace, Tarntanya/Adelaide.
