Opening Celebrations – 'Anarchive: Gut-feeling'

Join us at ACE on Friday 8 May to celebrate the opening of Anarchive: Gut-feeling

Experimental Art Anarchive is a two-venue exhibition and publishing program inviting lively conversation with a radical past.

Across ACE and FUMA, thirteen new artist commissions are presented, alongside key and lesser-known historic works by women. A special edition of Artlink acts as an extended reader – bringing a critical eye to experimental art then and now.

About the Exhibition:
Anarchive: Gut-feeling explores how experimental art is experienced, remembered and reimagined.

Bringing together eleven new commissions alongside rarely-seen historic works, the exhibition revisits experimental art through a living archive – one that includes artists and practices that have often been overlooked or underrepresented – particularly those by women.

Across installation, performance (live and recorded), sound, and participatory events, the works challenge the idea of art as something to simply look at. Instead, they emphasise bodily knowledge, participation, digestion and encounter – inviting audiences to engage through feeling, intuition, and shared experience, where works are encountered, absorbed and processed through the body as much as through thought.

Rather than presenting fixed meanings or resolved objects, the exhibition centres experimentation as an ongoing process. Works evolve through testing ideas, collaboration and risk – where outcomes are not always certain, and meaning is shaped through experience.

Anarchive: Gut-feeling connects past and present approaches to experimental art, opening up new ways of understanding how art is made, experienced and evolves. The exhibition is part of the Experimental Art Anarchive project – a partnership between ACE, Artlink and FUMA inviting lively conversation with a radical past.

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Support:

This project is supported by Create SA.
Anarchive: Gut-feeling is presented in partnership with Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE), Artlink, and Flinders University Museum of Art (FUMA).
This project is also supported by History Trust of South Australia and Griffith University.
Troy-Anthony Baylis is supported by City of Adelaide.
Ariella Napoli is supported by a City of PAE grant and Helpmann Academy.

Image: Jingwei Bu (2026), Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography Andre Castellucci.