Ellie Buttrose, Robert Andrew and Emmaline Zanelli - 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art – Yield Strength

Yield Strength is an engineering term that defines the amount of stress a material can take before it is permanently changed. It is also the name given to the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art by this edition’s curator, Ellie Buttrose. Rather than impose a theme from the start, the name was chosen after the twenty-four artists who make up the showcase were selected.

 

With the Biennial spread across the Art Gallery of South Australia as well as the Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Botanic Gardens, Yield Strength seems to capture the spirit of some of Buttrose’s discoveries during her selection process.

 

“As I was travelling, I noticed that there was kind of a general return to artists really playing with materials,” says the Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. “There seemed to be a lot of push and pull going on in the work, and this sense that things cannot go back to the way they were after you've pushed past that point becomes a metaphor for the way some artists are pushing parameters, but also for others who are thinking about how things have changed and can't go back.”

 

This is captured in very different ways by the work of two Yield Strength artists, Robert Andrew and Emmaline Zanelli. Andrew fuses elements of the natural and digital worlds to create works that evolve and erode over time in a way that explores hidden histories of Australia’s Indigenous communities. Zanelli presents a new video piece that explores the worlds of teenagers at work as they take on their first job.

 

“I was interested in kids joining the workforce, and the sense of independence that that can facilitate, but also going from a dependent to being someone who is an independent consumer, ” Zanelli says of Pocket Money (2025), which combines footage of young people with poetic text and a youth drum corps soundtrack. “I feel like we really over romanticise our memory of what we first bought, and I was kind of tentative about painting this picture of it being this awesome experience, because it's also a life sentence to get your first job, so I think there's two sides to that coin.”

Andrew’s works appear in two venues. At the Art Gallery of South Australia, new eyes – old Country – Nagula (2025) digs deep into his Yawuru Country roots using a moving television screen that charts the coastline of Yawuru Country as it appears in the video, with charcoal dragging behind to trace its path of travel. At Adelaide Botanic Garden, monolithic structures made from compacted soil unearth hidden histories as they evolve and decay.

 

“Part of the idea is to erode back or scrape back to show a non western indigenous view of history,” Andrew explains. “My mum's people, Yaru people, have been on that particular part of the country for tens of thousands of years, developing language, and a slowly evolving, but never static, culture, which was sort of locked off. I suppose the work is trying to show a sense of time that when you first see it is barely perceivable. You have to stand there and then start to see the detail of the movement and how things are working.”

 

Through her role in Queensland, Buttrose is well versed in the disparate state of Australian art. With this in mind, Yield Strength embraces a state of flux.

 

“I hope audiences aren't only looking at the works through a thematic bubble,” she says. “There are different types of practices and different threads that come out in the different spaces, and that starts to make you see the work through a different lens. So, what would it mean to have a figurative painter alongside other figurative painters, but then see them alongside more abstract work? 

 

“I didn't want to be thinking about artists in a bubble, and wanted to ask what it means to think about practices in relation to one another. If artists are drawing out the materiality of their work, I wanted the curatorial process to become obvious to people. If that's what artists are doing, then it should also be reflected in the curatorial methodology.” 

 

2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art – Yield Strength, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide and other venues, 27 February-6 June

The List Adelaide Festival Guide 2026

 

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