The Australian Experimental Art Foundation was established in 1974 by a small group of Adelaide artists and theorists in order to both encourage new approaches to the visual arts and to promote the idea of art as 'radical and only incidentally aesthetic'. Its inaugural Director was Noel Sheridan and since then has had ten Directors.
AEAF Directors
Noel Sheridan January 1975- September 1980
David Kerr October 1980-October 1983
Louise Dauth January 1984-March1987
Michael Snelling March 1987-October 1989
Martin Munz February 1990-May 1991
Richard Grayson August 1991- August 1998
Christopher Chapman August 1998-August 2001
Melentie Pandilovski April 2003-May 2009
Domenico de Clario May 2009-December 2011
Christine Morrow February 2011-February 2014
Steve Eland September 2014 —
The AEAF incorporates a gallery space, bookshop and residency studio. The aeaf curates its exhibition program to represent new work that expands current debates and ideas in contemporary art and culture. The contemporary visual arts sector that the Foundation supports, promotes, and seeks to stimulate includes practices that are inter-disciplinary and research-driven and have various gallery, project and urban outcomes.
Robyn Archer singer, writer, director, artistic director and public advocate of the arts, is a Patron of the aeaf
1. Our apprehension of the world is active, not passive, and art displays an emergent apprehension. 2. Art is only incidentally and not essentially aesthetic. Art is concerned with every kind of value and not particularly with beauty. 3. Art interrogates the status quo; it is essentially, and not incidentally, radical. 4. Art is experimental action: it models possible forms of life and makes them available to public criticism
