Ellie Buttrose, the curator who managed Archie Moore's Golden Lion-winning exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennale, has guided the artist toward something more intimate for the Adelaide Biennial. Where his Venice work sprawled across generations and documented the lives of thousands of ancestors, his new installation zooms in on a single relationship: Moore and his father, Stanley.
At Adelaide's Museum of Economic Botany, the exhibition feels less like contemporary art and more like a private archive. The 2026 Adelaide Biennial features new works by 24 artists including Robert Andrew, Nathan Beard, Lauren Burrow, and others, but Moore's contribution stands apart for its vulnerability. Among dark wood cabinets filled with seeds and tools sits his father's story, rendered in unexpected materials.
Moore explains the central tension of the work: his father spent years convinced he had discovered a gold deposit on land he grew up on. It was a recurring conversation, less a certainty and more a hope. Stanley Moore never found the gold. The project titled Remnants Of My Father attempts to realise that dream anyway, creating a collection of objects rendered in and inscribed with precious metals.
The exhibition's objects surprise with their specificity and their willingness to face difficult truths. A map and legal document appear in thin sheets of gold, creases and all. Copper and gold leaf accent botanical specimens. A life-size human heart rendered in gold sits alongside more mysterious pieces. In one display case sits what looks like a full bucket; Moore explains it held his father's urine. Stanley kept the bucket by his bed each night, emptying it each morning when it filled. He never saw a doctor. That symptom, Moore reflects, was an early warning sign of the prostate cancer that would eventually take his life.
Moore's approach reflects a broader artistic practice rooted in archival research and family investigation. Born in 1970 in Toowoomba, Moore is a Kamilaroi-Bigambul artist whose practice centres around histories of his own and those of his nation, exploring key signifiers of identity including genealogy and racism. His Venice work achieved something remarkable: Archie Moore became the first Australian to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, given to the best national pavilion at the world's oldest and most renowned art biennale.
That project, kith and kin, traced his family backward across 65,000 years. It was monumental, scholarly, and inevitably abstract. Remnants Of My Father does something different. Instead of mapping relationships, it investigates a single life and a single unfulfilled desire. The work asks what it means to preserve a person's hope, to honour a dream that never materialised.
A Biennial of Material Transformation
The 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art opened on 27 February with the title Yield Strength, bringing together twenty-four leading Australian artists with works that reveal how materials, selfhood and society are tested and transformed under pressure. Staged across three venues, artists reoccur in shifting combinations, enabling audiences to interpret practices within varying constellations across AGSA, Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Botanic Garden.
Other artists are exploring similar territory through different lenses. Erika Scott takes aim at the throw-away nature of household and garden materials in her environmental horror installation Necrorealist Sunscreen, a 10-metre assemblage of discarded plastic and consumer goods that forces visitors to confront waste and entropy.
What unites these disparate works is a shared interest in how materials reveal truths about time, decay, and human intention. The title Yield Strength borrows from engineering, describing the point at which a material permanently deforms under pressure; Buttrose extends the concept metaphorically, asking how artists push the limits of both material practice and cultural discourse.
Moore's use of gold operates on multiple registers. Gold is precious, durable, the metal his father sought. It is also soft, easy to shape, temporary when applied as leaf or paint. By rendering his father's story in gold, Moore transforms hope into something tangible while acknowledging that tangibility itself can be fragile. The bucket of urine, treated plainly and truthfully, sits alongside gilded objects. Nothing is romanticised. Everything is witnessed.
The 2026 Adelaide Biennial foregrounds how bodily experience and intellectual wonder are intimately entwined in the experience of art, revealing how materials, selfhood and society are tested and transformed under pressure. Moore's installation demonstrates this principle through the most personal of investigations: how to remember someone, how to honor a life, how to finish what they began.
For Australian readers familiar with Moore's international acclaim, Remnants Of My Father offers an unexpected gift. It is quieter than the Venice work, more intimate, more likely to break your heart. The exhibition runs until 8 June 2026 at three Adelaide venues.