Ellie Buttrose is the curator of the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, a survey exhibition featuring 24 artists across three venues: the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), the Adelaide Botanic Gardens and Samstag Museum of Art. Joining Samstag’s Associate Curator Anna Zagala in the studio midway through the exhibition’s installation Ellie shares how this survey of Australian contemporary art has unfolded and continues to surprise her, what these artworks and art practices reveal and why exhibition making is an experimental practice.

2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art Yield Strength
Friday 27 February — Monday 8 June 2026

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In 2025 Samstag Museum of Art invited Kaurna-based artist and Samstag scholar Monte Masi to create a new work to be performed across multiple performances in the gallery. Monte joins Associate Curator Anna Zagala to discuss what drew him to art in the first place, the thrills and perils of the improvised unscripted encounters, and his experience living and studying in San Francisco during a tech boom and the tail end of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

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Ryan Presley (Marri Ngarr) is a visual artist living on Yugambeh Country (Logan City, QLD). His practice spans painting, printmaking, sculpture, video, installation, and writing, and is marked by a deep engagement with the visual economies of power, memory, and resistance.

Commissioned by the University in 2024 to paint a portrait of its Chancellor, the Honorable John Hill, Ryan joins Associate Curator Anna Zagala in the studio to discuss his exhibition Daydreamer, how growing up in Mparntwe/Alice Springs and an early love of drawing shaped his trajectory, and what he hoped to convey of the sitter in the portrait, currently on display at Samstag Museum of Art.

The episode concludes with a throw to Samstag and Ryan’s conversation with art historian Dr Andrea Bubenik.

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