2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: colour, wonder, materialism and magic

The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art begins before you enter the main gallery space. Nests of rods wrapped in colourful yarn and embellished with hacky sacks, bells and pompoms are tangled together in an amorphous mass, which drips from the bannisters and wraps around the standing posts as you walk down the stairs.

When you arrive in the gallery these curios are everywhere: hanging from the ceiling and rising from the floor, creeping into corners and growing from the walls. At the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) media preview, artist Hiromi Tango completes the work in full costume and makeup: a bright orange lizard stalking among the orange mass, which represents her ever-growing tail. The audience are invited to contribute too, donating messages of wellbeing and rejuvenation, wrapped in plastic, woven into new tails and added to the piece.

Tango’s work, Breaking Cycle (Lizard Tail), is representative of the colour, playfulness, magic and materiality that dominates the 14^th Adelaide Biennial. Since 1990, the Biennial has aimed to survey the landscape of contemporary art in Australia, and this year’s theme, Magic Object, was chosen by first-time Biennial curator Lisa Slade.

Slade, who managed the previous two iterations of the event, took as her inspiration the notion of the Wunderkammer – “cabinets of curiosities” that originated in Renaissance Europe. The patrons of these museums would collect unusual natural history, geology, art and science artefacts – dappled, of course, with a few fakes – in an attempt to better understand the world, or at least communicate one version of it.

Slade’s version is a fun and wondrous place to be. At the public launch on Friday, Adelaide festival’s ebullient outgoing artistic director David Sefton contrasted it with the 2014 Biennale, themed Dark Heart: “It might be simplistic to say that if we got the dark-hearted two years ago, we’ve got the light-hearted this time – but I’m going to say it anyway.”

Slade doesn’t balk at the comparison. “I feel absolutely fine about that,” she says when we meet outside the Samstag Museum, which is hosting a portion of this year’s exhibition. “Each Biennial, each major exhibition, does become kind of a response to the last.”

This is, above all, an accessible collection, as filled with humour as it is with high concepts. Pop culture references abound: Mumford & Sons lyrics sprinkle the large scale and brightly coloured abstract works of Gareth Sansom; Heather B Swann’s towering, sinister Banksia Men reference the villains of May Gibbs’s Snugglepot and Cuddlepie; Tiger Yaltangki’s figurative canvasses bring together personal history, Indigenous spirituality and characters from Doctor Who and The Mighty Boosh; and one of Michael Zavros’s pieces – meticulously detailed paintings rendered from photographs of bouquets – is called, and looks like, Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons.

Clay makes up a big part of the exhibition: the pottery of Glenn Barkley, contained within his own custom-made Wunderkammer; the totemic ceramic sculptures of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, which merge his Hindu heritage with icons of gay male culture; the anthropomorphic clay figures that comprise Nell’s The Wake; and Juz Kitson’s extraordinary bulbous collections of bone, hair, porcelain and teeth, which seem to drip from the ceiling and walls, begging to be touched.

Last year, the Biennial claimed attendance figures of 110,000 – up 10% from 2014 – and this is the first year it has expanded beyond the confines of the AGSA, taking in four other venues. It prides itself on being the only survey of Australian contemporary art in the country, but this presents its own dilemma: how do you stick to a curatorial theme while representing the full, broad landscape of Australian art?

Slade says it’s about staying flexible. “You have to have a theme that’s generous enough that you can drive anything through it. Magic Object and the Wunderkammer premise worked for that. Obviously there’s a really strong slant towards materiality here, but it’s not exclusive.

“Artists aren’t the cyphers for a curatorial vision; it’s the other way around,” she says. “But it’s a very good question, and I think it’s a question, it’s a problem that all curatorial practice faces.”

Slade says it’s “uncanny” how many of the artists she had been watching already shared her interest in the Wunderkammer. “The Wunderkammer is a kind of shared obsession … There’s nothing esoteric about it – it’s the foundation of, in some ways, collecting practices and museum practice. How can you not have a fascination with puffer fish and coco de mer?”

Australia’s most celebrated glass artist, Tom Moore, describes it as a “fascination with fascination itself”. His whimsical glass sculptures are zoological hybrids of familiar objects and animals, which become fantastical, funny new beings under his hand. A teapot with wheels and a carrot for his nose has a turd-filled trailer in tow; a potato that’s a fish but is also a face smiles vacantly at itself; birds whose bodies are somehow also their beaks look at each other through their many human eyes.

The majority are held at AGSA, in a room you could spend hours in. Unsurprisingly, the Wunderkammer has been a driver of his work for years. “It’s all about curiosity and discovery, and it’s also about trickery: that whole history [of the Wunderkammer] is just riddled with fakes as well,” he says. “There was so much that was so alien, and it did lead to this kind of culture of very imaginative and fanciful things.”

Meticulously planned on paper in full size, each of the hundreds of pieces comprising Moore’s collection has then been blown and hot-worked in glass, with a craftsmanship that’s as admirable for its technical skill as it is for its creativity. “I’m more satisfied making something that is sort of a little bit troubling than just beautiful and cute,” Moore says. “It is, I guess, trying to shock – just a little, like a pleasant cognitive shift that makes you think a bit differently about stuff … Anything that makes your mind stand on its own head I think is very satisfying.”

The Biennial is rounded out by a hefty representation from Indigenous Australia: work from Tiger Yaltangki, Bluey Roberts, Pepai Jangala Carroll, Danie Mellor, and the bold and beautiful “ilma” or dancing rods from Bardi elder Roy Wiggan, who passed away late last year.

“You can’t survey contemporary Australian art without looking at Aboriginal art,” Slade says. She recalls Uncle Stevie Goldsmith’s welcome to country at the public Biennial launch on Friday, in which he spoke about how, for Aboriginal Australians, most objects are imbued with magic. He asked the audience to consider the question: is the magic in the artist, in the object, or in the relationship between the audience and the art?

“I thought, ‘Oh, we can all go home now’,” Slade laughs. “When an Aboriginal elder can articulate the premise of the exhibition in so few words, you can see why [Aboriginal art] was totally necessary to the exhibition.”

The most talked about Biennial artist is Loongkoonan, who began painting 10 years ago when she was 95 years old. She made the trip from her Western Australia community to Adelaide for the launch, where she was swamped by media and grabbed for enough selfies that she was trending on Twitter by the evening.

Her intricate paintings chart the Nyikina country she has travelled – articulating nature, land and spirituality, as part of a larger project about remembering culture. Her work adds crucial weight to the Adelaide Biennial. “She paints up country in a way that we see that country is magical,” Slade says. “If we can learn a little bit from that perspective, I think the world will be a much better place.”

• The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art runs at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, and select other venues in Adelaide, until 15 May. Guardian Australia travelled to Adelaide as a guest of Adelaide festival