UQ Art Museum partnered with the Art Gallery of South Australia to co-commission new work by Charlie Sofo, that was exhibited from 27 February - 8 June 2026, as part of the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength, curated by Ellie Buttrose.
Two new sculptural and video installations continue Sofo’s playful and poetic wanderings through the everyday places and things that fill our lives yet often slip through the cracks of our consciousness.
The carefully arranged elements of Moon Update (2026) were spread throughout a large gallery space and included things found, fabricated and filmed. A video captures the details of fruit boxes in dramatic lighting, turning everyday detritus into an elaborate theatre. Other components are the result of opportunistic foraging for both images and objects, such as arrangements of socks found on the footpath, e-scooter helmets, a video cataloguing variously encountered bollards, and carefully organised collections of deconstructed coat hangers and used ear plugs. The supporting structures for the objects range from bespoke to industrial. Distinctions between the found and the manufactured, the accidental and the deliberate, curiosity and indifference, coalesce among the seemingly endless scales and accumulations of materials that surround us.
Elsewhere, The Whole Universe (2026) confined its objects to a single retail display cabinet mounted on the gallery wall. The work is named after a defunct, but once abundant, eBay store, its dizzying array of products depicted in a rhythmic video in the cabinet, interspersed with footage of Sofo’s home city, Naarm/Melbourne. Other objects in the cabinet evoke images of space, from stars on a map of a shopping centre, to Astral Whip and a business card from “Galactic Video”. Shiny chocolate wrappers, scrunched into balls, evoke planets: a shoddy model of the solar system, now glistening under gallery lights.
Sofo explores the interplay of repetition and variation in the abundance of materials with which we are enmeshed, both cherished and discarded, and which can transport us to the stars or sit in the gutter, or both.
Leigh Robb, in the Yield Strength catalogue, writes, “Sofo’s categories of objects are charming and human. Assembled intuitively, they speak of moments of connection […]. He has a ceaseless capacity for being interested in ever-new groupings of mundane things; he has built up an oeuvre of transforming nothing much into something more. The warmth of his curiosity is matched by the aliveness of his imagination, with his videos and scores becoming exercises in intimacy and proximity.”
