Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art

Australia's longest-running survey of contemporary Australian art

The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art is the survey by which Australian contemporary art has been measured against itself since 1990. Founded under the directorship of Daniel Thomas at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the inaugural edition opened in 1990 with an unusually disciplined institutional premise: a biennial, museum-sited, single-curator survey devoted exclusively to Australian contemporary art-making, programmed in alignment with the Adelaide Festival of Arts rather than against it. Thirty-six years and nineteen editions later, every one of those structural choices has been preserved.