Opening on 27 February, the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength assembles twenty-four leading Australian artists with works that reveal how materials, selfhood and society are tested – and transformed – under pressure.
Taking over multiple spaces at the Art Gallery of South Australia as well as partner venues Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Botanic Garden, Yield Strength will launch with a series of artist talks, panel discussions, performances, DJ sets and more, in celebration of the 19th iteration of the nation’s longest-standing survey of contemporary Australian art.
“The 2026 Adelaide Biennial foregrounds how bodily experience and intellectual wonder are intimately entwined in the experience of art. Working across painting, sculpture, moving image, performance and installation, the artists in Yield Strength reflect an understanding of the pressures that shape this current moment, a respect for breaking points and a resourceful approach to cultural continuity,” said Yield Strength curator Ellie Buttrose.
“Since its founding in 1990, the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art has been the nation’s longest-running survey of contemporary practice, consistently championing experimental and ambitious approaches. The 2026 edition continues this legacy, affirming the Biennial’s role as a site of research and a reassertion that art can yield and reveal new modes of endurance, empathy, invention and profound transformation,” said AGSA Director Jason Smith.
Staged across three venues, artists reoccur in shifting combinations, enabling audiences to interpret practices within varying constellations across AGSA, Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Botanic Garden. Artists stretch and test materials to their limits with new works that explore resilience and transformation, revealing the complex, dynamic relations between people and the world they inhabit.
At AGSA, Erika Scott’s 10-metre-long installation melts and oozes plastic from household kitsch items, transforming the gallery into an environmental horror film set. Other artists examine how possessions can shape not only our sense of the world, but also our desires.
The paucity of elaborative detail in Prudence Flint’s delicately rendered oil paintings of women in domestic spaces means that the items and clothing accompanying the figures take on a potent charge. Pocket Money, 2025, a new video by Emmaline Zanelli, captures young adults in moments of leisure and labour – working in their first jobs, spending their wages, refining their hobbies and passing time with friends.
Within the Museum of Economic Botany at Adelaide Botanic Garden, Archie Moore creates a portrait of his father Stanley Moore in absentia through a series of objects cast in gold, in his major installation Remnants Of My Father, 2025.
Mementoes referencing Stanley’s life – a set of dentures, shiny crystals of pyrite (fool’s gold), an anatomical heart cast, a possession notice for gold mining, a hand-drawn map, a eucalyptus leaf, World War II medals and a scuffed red bucket – fill wooden vitrines, infused with the metal that remained elusive to Stanley throughout his life.
Gold likewise appears in artist Kirtika Kain’s abstract paintings. Gold and tar are charged substances for the Dalit community – a caste relegated to the base of the Hindu class system – as they signify materials associated with demanding labour. Kain harness the cultural weight of these materials and transforms them through her creative studio practice into colour field paintings.
Artists such as Mark Maurangi Carrol and Nathan Beard take a creative approach to inherited aesthetic traditions. Carrol presses paint through the back of his canvases to reveal figurative traces of people and places across the Avaiki Nui/Cook Islands.
Beard reshapes his Thai inheritance and reimagines it in exquisite silicone casts of his hands and feet, rendered in hyper realistic detail. Clasping at durian fruits, pink orchids and 3D-printed Buddhas, some hands flick backwards in the style of the fon lep fingernail dance; others magically stretch until the fingers become long ropes of flesh.
To connect with his Yawuru ancestral land, Robert Andrew’s kinetic drawing machine uses digital technology to reinstate the contours of Country onto the gallery walls. Mounted to an armature, a screen displays drone footage of Yawuru Country, twisting and moving with the coastline while charcoal is slowly dragged across the length of the wall, in a moving meditation on Country, history and language.
AGSA’s activity space The Studio will be transformed for artist Charlie Sofo’s installation Time Capsule, consisting of a universe of objects that encourage participants to think about the significance of and our relationships to objects.
Visitors are invited to create their own time capsule using arrangements of objects, words, drawings or small items brought from home. Each capsule can be sealed and taken home as a keepsake or left behind for others to discover, creating an evolving archive of shared experiences and private worlds.
Yield Strength is on display until 8 June 2026 and feature new works by artists from across the nation including: 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, and Emmaline Zanelli.
2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength
Art Gallery of South Australia, North Terrace, Adelaide
Exhibition: 27 February – 8 June 2026
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.agsa.sa.gov.au for details.
Images: Nathan Beard, born Whadjuk Nyoongar Country, Boorloo/ Perth, Western Australia 1987, Cicerone, 2025, painted silicone, PLA, steel, foam, resin, found objects, dimensions variable; Courtesy of the artist, FUTURES – photo by Christian Capurro | Brian Fuata, born Aotearoa New Zealand 1978, Errantucation (mist opportunities), 2021 / Performance improvisations commissioned for ‘The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT10). QAGOMA, Brisbane, 2021. © the artist – courtesy of artist and Sumer – photo by C Callistemon, QAGOMA | Archie Moore, Kamilaroi/Bigambul people, New South Wales/Queensland, born Giabal Country, Toowoomba, Queensland 1970, Heart of Gold 1, 2026, 10.5 x 17.5 x 10.91 cm; 18ct gold-plated, sterling silver heart with bronzed frame, Courtesy The Commercial, Sydney – photo: Pallion Arts Program | Mark Maurangi Carrol, Māori Kūki Āirani
people, Cook Islands, born Dharawal Country, Warrang/Sydney, New South Wales 1995, Psalm (part 3), 2024, oil enamel, permanent marker on linen, 153.0 x 122.0cm; © Nasha Gallery and Mark Maurangi Carrol – photo: Volodymyr Kravchenko | Jennifer Mathews, born Kaurna Country, Tarntanya/Adelaide, South Australia 1994, Score, 2025, stainless steel, dinner plates, 70.0 x 70.0 x 28.0 cm – photo by Jonathan van der Knaap