From fabric to family, there’s much to discover in Adelaide Festival’s tightly curated visual art programme. The tellingly named Radical Textiles looks at one of the most quietly unsung of artforms that’s nonetheless been central to the visual identity of protest movements, from William Morris in the 19th century to Sonia Delauney in the 20th and beyond. The exhibition is a patchwork of more than 100 artists, designers and activists drawn from Art Gallery Of South Australia’s expansive collections of international, Australian and First Nations work, knitting together a history of textiles across 150 years.

The meaning of family is behind Shared Skin, a group show at ACE Gallery of contemporary artists from a variety of cultures and backgrounds depicting family in myriad ways. Twelve artists from different countries and continents look at how family is defined by way of umbilical links to class, sexuality, culture and community across the global village.

The Taken Path chooses an even more forensic approach. Artists Catherine Truman and Ian Gibbins embark on a sisyphean experiment in repetition in a moving-image work based on the duo taking the same walk through the Carrick Hill estate every month for a year. This creates an ever-evolving document of changing seasons and landscapes, becoming a kind of psychogeographic durational meditation. Also keeping a straight and clear path is Direct, Directed, Directly, a group show at Samstag Museum Of Art that uses performance, moving image, installation and sound to attempt to map out an international language of communication that goes beyond words and borders. 

At Adelaide Festival Centre, performance in its purest form can be seen in After Images: 60 Years Of Australian Dance Theatre, featuring photographs, films, costumes and other ephemera, providing a crucial insight into the company’s evolution from first baby steps to international institution.

Over at the Fringe, there’s also a busy visual art programme, with more than 60 exhibitions and events covering an array of themes. Highlights include the Red Poles Indigenous Fringe Festival, a mini-festival within the Fringe, showing work across all art forms. Susan Bruce’s Weathered is a series of paintings of solitary figures in industrial urban landscapes, while Female Politicians Of Adelaide is a short history of local politicos in sketches and paintings.

Finally, Sovereign Acts / Love Praxis is a major show at Flinders University Museum Of Art, where Unbound Collective celebrate a decade of radical thinking, making and doing in a cross-art form show, rethinking sovereignty and representation through First Nations perspectives and methodologies.

Main picture: Tony Kearney.