Stelarc | 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres

STELARC | 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres.

"In an age of zombie bodies, humanoid robots and lab chimeras, 2020 Adelaide Biennial artist Stelarc Stelarc asks the question, is the human body obsolete?

Stelarc is an internationally recognised pioneering performance artist who has tested and pushed the limits of the human body for over fifty years. His lectures, performances and installations explore themes of the post-human and the trans-human using prosthetics, robotics, biotechnology and virtual reality systems. Stelarc’s work interrogates the binary conceptions of human/machine and self/other.

In 1996 he was made an Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University. In 2002 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by Monash University. In 2010 Stelarc received the prestigious Golden Nica, the highest prize at the Prix Ars Electronica."


STELARC will undertake a 5 hour performance of 'Reclining Stickman' on Saturday 29 February 2020 (11.30 am - 4.30 pm) and a 'Keynote talk' on Sunday 1 March 2020 (11 am).


"In 2020, the Adelaide Biennial celebrates a 30-year milestone as the nation’s longest-running curated survey of contemporary Australian art. Since 1990, the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art has created career-defining opportunities for more than 350 artists and presented to close to one million visitors.

Titled 'Monster Theatres', the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art invites artists to make visible the monsters of our time. Curator Leigh Robb says ‘Monsters ask us to interrogate our relationships with each other, the environment and technology. They force us to question our empathy towards difference across race, gender, sexuality and spirituality'.

The term ‘monster’ comes from Latin monere, to warn, and monstrare, to show or make visible. The exhibition title hints at a double narrative which also resonates through the multiple meanings of ‘theatre’. An operating theatre is a room in which to examine, dissect as well as heal; it is also a theatre of war, a site of conflict where clashes between nations and ideologies play out all too frequently, but a theatre is also an arena – an active social space.

AGSA Curator of Contemporary Art, Leigh Robb, says 'Monster Theatres proposes an arena of speculation, a circus of the unorthodox and the absurd, a shadow play between truth and fiction. The title is inspired by a group of provocative Australian artists. Their urgent works of art are warnings made manifest. These theatres are theirs.'"

Artists include | Abdul Abdullah, APHIDS, Mike Bianco, Polly Borland, Michael Candy, Megan Cope, Erin Coates and Anna Nazzari, Julian Day, Karla Dickens, Mikala Dwyer, Brent Harris, Aldo Iacobelli, Pierre Mukeba, David Noonan, Mike Parr, Julia Robinson, Yhonnie Scarce, Stelarc Stelarc, Garry Stewart and Australian Dance Theatre, Kynan Tan, Mark Valenzuela, Willoh S. Weiland and Judith Wright