SASA Gallery

The SASA Gallery (South Australian School of Art Gallery) is an outreach and exhibition facility within UniSA's School of Art, Architecture & Design. The Gallery's exhibition, publication and external scholar programs focus on innovative contemporary art, architecture, design, curatorial and writing practices. The SASA Gallery's exhibition and publication programs seek to position the artists, designers and researchers we work with in a national and international context, engage with critical dialogue and debate, and enable artists, designers, curators and writers to generate new art and new ideas. As  an active site of teaching and learning SASA Gallery supports the full range of taught programs within the School and has a strong outreach program with free exhibitions, events, gallery floortalks and guest lectures open to the public.

Christian Thompson, Berceuse, 2017

Christian Thompson: 

Ritual Intimacy

 

Curators: Charlotte Day and Hetti Perkins

Monday 12 February - Sunday 18 March 2018

 

Drawing from the first major survey of the work of Bidjara artist Christian Thompson, Samstag Museum of Art presents Ritual Intimacy at University of South Australia’s SASA Gallery.

Through video, sound and photography, Thompson explores the concept of spiritual repatriation, which he developed recently working with the Australian collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum to complete his PhD at the University of Oxford. Rather than appropriating or restaging problematic ethnographic images of Indigenous ancestors held in the Museum’s photographic collection, Thompson chose to spend significant periods of time with these images, absorbing their aura and developing a personal artistic and deferential response that is decisively empowered.

Ritual Intimacy features an ambitious new commission, Berceuse. In this immersive three-channel sound and video installation, Thompson sings in Bidjara – his ancestral language that is considered to be officially endangered. Thompson practices what he describes as ‘the simple yet profound idea that if even one word of an endangered language is spoken it continues to be a living language’.

Ritual Intimacy by Christian Thompson is a MUMA exhibition curated by Charlotte Day, Director, MUMA and Hetti Perkins and presented at SASA Gallery by the Samstag Museum of Art. This project has been supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria. MUMA also acknowledges the support of the Gordon Darling Foundation for the accompanying publication.

 

Image: Christian Thompson, Berceuse, 2017, video still, courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin

 

SASA Gallery Exhibitions

  

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Proposals for exhibitions and related projects are invited from artists, designers, architects, curators, writers, postgraduate students and academic researchers, including those who have an affiliation with the School of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of South Australia.

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Exhibition catalogues

SASA Gallery catalogues can be viewed for past exhibitions. Introductory text is by Dr Mary Knights. Catalogue design and production by Keith Giles, Exhibitions Officer.

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Past Exhibitions

The South Australian School of Art (SASA) Gallery was established in 2005 in the Kaurna Building. See past exhibition information about the artists, invites and images of their work.

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