Image: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Mark Feary has been appointed curator of the 2028 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, which will be presented at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide from 3 March to 4 June 2028 as part of the 2028 Adelaide Festival.
Feary is an Aotearoa New Zealand-born curator with more than 20 years of experience working across contemporary art centres, universities, museums and artist-led initiatives. He is currently artistic director of Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne, a role he holds alongside a career that has included positions at the Australian Centre for Photography and Artspace in Sydney, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne and West Space in Melbourne.
The appointment places Feary at the helm of one of Australia’s longest-running recurring exhibitions of contemporary art. Conceived as part of the Adelaide Festival in 1990, the Adelaide Biennial has provided career-defining opportunities for close to 500 artists and has been experienced by more than two million visitors, according to the Art Gallery of South Australia.
The biennial also has a direct relationship with the gallery’s collection. The institution describes the exhibition as a vehicle through which it has historically expanded its holdings of contemporary art. Following the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, titled ‘Yield Strength’, 13 works were acquired for the Art Gallery of South Australia collection.
Those acquisitions include Matthew Teapot Djipurrtjun’s ‘Wodhalyu dhäwu (The Story of Wodhal)’, two sculptural works by d harding, four works by Milminyina Dhamarrandji, Josina Pumani’s ‘Black Mist’, Julie Nangala Robertson’s ‘Mina Mina Jukurrpa’, Mark Maurangi Carrol’s ‘Titikaveka (Aka va'a) (to cause openings to cut or make gaps in space)’ and three works from Nathan Beard’s ‘Untitled (Ciceroni)’ series.
The Art Gallery of South Australia, founded in 1881, holds almost 47,000 works of art and design, including extensive Australian holdings—among them works by Aboriginal and South Australian artists—as well as contemporary, European and Asian collections. The gallery is located at 490 North Terrace, Adelaide, on Kaurna land. The 2028 Adelaide Biennial will run from 3 March through 4 June 2028.
