What regional galleries are showing in 2019

Regional galleries continue to punch above their weight in 2019, rolling out ambitious, erudite and often provocative programs that extend audience engagement.
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Melbourne artist, Danica Chappel Thickness of Time (until 24 February), at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria; courtesy the artist and gallery

There is a vibrancy across our regional gallery network that encourages one to travel, while also extending the engagement of local audiences through exhibitions that are dynamic, thinking and relevant. ArtsHub has taken a scan across the calendar at this early point in the year, to see what is on the books.

We encourage all regional and metropolitan galleries to keep our readers up to date with their activities – one of the comments we most hear at ArtsHub is that it is so hard getting press coverage and visibility on what you are doing. Help us help you.

Queensland

Things are hot in Northern Queensland in 2019.  Cairns Art Gallery (CAG) has put together a great program this year kicking off with Physical Video (until 3 February), which explores performance and theatricality in video art in Australia from the 1970s through to the present day. It is a great example of what regional galleries do well when partnering with our State institutions to activate their collections to broader audiences. Physical Video is presented in partnership with the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA).

Also setting the tone for 2019, CAG is showing ARTNOW FNQ 2019 the Gallery’s biennial exhibition that showcases the best art and design from Far North Queensland (until 2 Feb), and turning to design icon Linda Jackson with the exhibition Tropical Designs (8 February – 5 May) which looks at forty years of her impact and influence on contemporary Australian fashion, in particular textile designs relating to the countries she visited within the world’s tropic zone.

Linda JACKSON, Heliconia poncho 1987, handprint on cotton, 108 x 124 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Blueclick Photography

And remember the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair returns to Queensland, 11-14 July, in a big splash for its 10th anniversary.

HOTA, Home of the Arts on the Gold Coast starts the year with a “people pleaser”, Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits, travelling to Queensland from Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery and the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, and features the iconic faces and moments from a 100 years of Australian film. Catch it from 2 March – 28 April.

The Ipswich Art Gallery has chosen an exhibition that is ripe for audience interaction. Playing with Light (showing through 28 April) is a full-body immersive exhibition with over 22 interactive exhibits that explores the role light plays in our life and in our world by showing us how lights function in advanced technologies including: communication, security and medicine through to the lightbulb and lasers.This exhibition was created by SCITECH, Perth, Western Australia

Toowoomba Region Gallery opens the year with a solo exhibition by local artist Peta Berghofer. Commonplace explores the synthesis of sculptural and functional ceramics with the intention of disrupting a sense of functionality. This body of work is designed to bounce between two sectors and discuss the dichotomy between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. Continuing the intersection between clay and art object, alternative plinth forms referencing everyday furniture are used to display the ceramics, and are modelled from the artist’s living space. Together, the ceramics and plinths create abstract still-life installations that slip between gallery and domestic space. Showing through 3 February.

Victoria

Bendigo Art Gallery offer another exclusive blockbuster in 2019, this time turning to the Royals. Tudors to Windsors (16 March – 14 July) traces the history of the British monarchy through the outstanding collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.  Spanning monarchs from the 17th century to the present, it examines the ways in which royal portraits were impacted by both the personalities of individual monarchs and wider historical change.

Queen Elizabeth I (The ‘Ditchley’ portrait) By Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c.1592 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Later in the year, the gallery takes an aesthetic pendulum swing with the exhibition Slippage, which examines the collaborative practice of Australian born Chinese Vietnamese ceramicist and contemporary artists, Hwafern Quach and Phuong Ngo (18 April – 5 May). Consisting of 4,440 celadon glazed mooncakes cast from traditional hand-carved moulds sourced from North Vietnam, this work comments on China’s expansionism, and current position on and in the South China Sea.  Overall Slippage, examines the cycles of history in conjunction with current geopolitical and economic discussions.

And in November, Bendigo Art Gallery will present the first edition of Going Solo: First Nations (November 2019 – February 2020, artist announced March) extending their popular annual program to provide a unique opportunity for a First Nations artist living and working in regional Victoria and working alongside the Gallery’s First Nations Curator.

William Delafield Cook A Haystack 1978 (detail), TarraWarra Museum of Art collection, Gift of Eva Besen and Marc Besen AO 2001

Closer to Melbourne, the TarraWarra Museum of Art kicks off the year with the first Victorian showing of Tracey Moffatt’s photographic series Body Remembers 2017 and video work Vigil 2017 from 57th Venice Biennale (23 March – 19 May). It will be shown with an exhibition curated by Anthony Fitzpatrick, Thought Patterns: Selected Works from the Collection, which takes its cue from a chart featured in the publication for Moffatt’s Biennale exhibition that outlines the intriguing constellation of influences, ideas, memories and phenomena, in the work of artists such as Russell Drysdale, Rosalie Gascoigne, Aida Tomescu, William Delafield Cook, Louise Hearman, Charles Blackman and others.

Katie West, muhlu garrwarn / cool time hot time 2017, installation view, VCA Graduate Exhibition, 2017. Photo: Lucia Rossi. Courtesy of the artist.

Also unveiled in March, Curator Anthony Fitzpatrick takes a serious look at the fibre practice of Indigenous artist Katie West with the exhibition Clearing (23 March – 19 May). The exhibition is comprised of floor to ceiling textile works, cushions and seating, all naturally dyed using plants collected from the local region, as well as key texts by Indigenous writers. This new multisensory installation has been commissioned by TarraWarra as part of ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2019.

Highlights for Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2019 include the phenomenal VR commission by Jess Johnson and Simon Ward: Terminus (9 November 2019 – 1 March 2020), which tours from the National Gallery of Australia, and earlier in the year the exhibition, An idea needing to be made: Contemporary Ceramics (27 July – 20 October)

Heide presents the solo exhibition of Melbourne artist, Danica Chappel Thickness of Time (until 24 February, pictured top), Curated by Sue Cramer. Chappell works in an observational and exploratory way to ‘abstract and re-interpret’ concepts of photography. She uses elements of collage and wet darkroom techniques to create non-figurative motifs, drawing upon and extending the photographic experiments of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. It is one of many solo exhibitions across the gallery landscape in 2019.

The 2019 Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award (SMFACA) returns to Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) 22 June to 1 September, with the winner announced Friday, 21 June 2019. Six shortlisted artists will present their new bodies of work. For 2019 they are: Julie Bartholomew, Stephen Bird, Greg Daly, Lynda Draper, Juz Kitson, and Isadora Vaughan.

Paul Yore, Map, 2012, wool tapestry, 90 x 101cm, Wangaratta Art Gallery Collection, © the artist.

But before that descends on the gallery, Craftivism. Dissident Objects and Subversive Forms, questions the art / craft position through the work of 18 contemporary Australian artists who utilise craft based materialities with a political intent. Showing until 17 February, it will then tour regional Australia through NETS Victoria.

Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski, Pavo 1965, plastic collage and synthetic polymer paint on plywood, 121.8 x 121.7 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria from the Bequest of Violet Dulieu, Founder Benefactor, 1997 (1997.179). Reproduced with kind permission of the Estate of J S Ostoja-Kotkowski and the National Gallery of Victoria.

A highlight of the calendar is the exhibition Solid Light: Josef Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski, presented by McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery (1 April – 14 July). The Polish-born Australian immigrant became pivotal in the development of Australian experimental and new media art, pioneering electronic art, he made innovations in computer and laser technology, including kinetics and sound, which he applied to visual art, music and theatre. He was the first artist in Australia to use television as an artistic medium, and arguably the first in the world to use lasers in a stage production. Solid Light will be the first major survey of his practice.

A partnership with Midsumma Festival sees two new exhibitions and an artist residency coming to Bundoora Homestead Art Centre in 2019. Pinkwashing is a striking new installation by Melbourne artist Richard Harding, transforming the entrance to the Homestead with large-scale vinyl images in vibrant pink. Juxtaposing images of celebration with archive footage of targeted attacks on people of difference, Pinkwashing examines the unique challenges that still confront LGBTIQA+ people. It is paired with Dapper, which examines the cultural stereotype of the Dapper Queer and the allure of the queer gaze. Both showing until 3 March.

For Geelong Gallery, it turns to the centenary of the influential Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in 2019 with the exhibition Bauhaus centenary – Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (23 February to 26 May), a student at the school before his detention and then deportation to Australia.

Another highlight for Geelong is the exhibition John Wolseley and Mulkun Wirrpanda: Molluscs / Maypal and the warming of the seas (30 March to 2 June 2019) curated around the 2016 gift of a ten-metre long, six panel panoramic watercolour The pearl fisher’s voyage from Ise Shima to Roebuck Bay, 1985–89, for a new immersive installation in which Wolseley and senior Yolgnu artist Mulkun Wirrpanda, extend their decade-long collaboration.

The gallery is also a recipient of the national touring exhibition, Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series (2 March to 26 May).

Western Australia

The Fremantle Arts Centre is putting up a great show for Perth Festival, David Noonan’s A Dark and Quiet Place. The London-based Australian artist has made his name internationally as an assembler of black and white photographic images collected from found books and periodicals, which are juxtaposed and collated to conjure a range of narratives. He has created an immersive installation for FAC including a film that rethinks this 10-year archive of images and a new tapestry and screenprints that respond to it.

FAC is also painting artists Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran and Renee So with the exhibition Idols. Working primarily in figurative hand-built ceramics, both artists aim to challenge and overturn old perspectives on gendered power structures and the aesthetics of spiritualities, and a “faceoff” about gender, power and signifiers. Both exhibitions, 7 February – 24 March.

While not entirely within the regional gallery network, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) kicks off the year for the Perth Festival with Alchemic, the Australian premiere of transgender artist Cassils (10 February – 14 April). Cassils’ first exhibition in Australia features video, photography and sculpture, as well as a presentation of their iconic performance, Becoming an Image. Cassils has achieved international recognition for a rigorous engagement with the body as a form of social sculpture.

Perth’s newest ARI, Cool Change Contemporary launches its 2019 program with four new solo exhibitions by local and interstate artists, Dalton Stewart (VIC), Guy Louden (NSW), Stephen Armitstead (WA) and Devon Ward (WA). Opens 1 February, while Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery offer a diverse program for 2019, kicking off with Love, Displaced (9 February — 11 May) where film- based and video art offers new and innovative modes of navigating the white noise of contemporary life towards places of re-sensitisation and emotional engagement. Artists Jacobus Capone, Richard Lewer (NZ), Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg, Christian Thompson; AES+F (Russia), Jeremy Deller and Cecilia Bengolea (UK, Argentina/France), Roee Rosen (Israel). Three of the Australian artists have specific links to WA, either their birthplace or the subject of works presented.

They also present solo exhibitions by Philip Noakes, one of the foremost silversmiths working and teaching in Australia, and Perth-based, internationally recognised botanical and wildlife artist, Philippa Nikulinsky AM, and a look at the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, now housed at the University of Western Australia, through the lens of the 100 self-portraits it contains – all opening 25 May.

There’s a lot of inspiring and innovative visual art showing in galleries cross regional WA that deserves acknowledgement. Geraldton Regional Arts Gallery is hosting the biennial Mid West Art Prize in mid-February. The Great Southern Award at the Vancouver Arts Centre in Albany starts taking entries this week, while the Cossack Art Awards in Karratha are set to take place again in July of this year with a prize pool of over $100,000.

Art on the Move have a slew of touring exhibitions set to travel to regional galleries in the coming 12 months. There’s a multitude of galleries and Aboriginal art centres showcasing work by First Nations artists, including Visitants | Menagerie in Port Hedland, including Roeburne Art Group in the far north-west, Yamaji Art in Geraldton and Tjukurba Art Gallery in Wiluna, so keep WA on your radar in 2019.

South Australia

Country Arts SA, in partnership with the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Regional Galleries Association of South Australia, present the touring exhibition Robyn Stacey: Ray of Light. From September 2018 to September 2020, the exhibition will tour fourteen venues across the breadth of regional South Australia, from Naracoorte (February), Millicent (March), Murray Bridge (April), and beyond wrapping up in the Barossa in 2019. For this exhibition, eight large-scale camera obscura photographs by Robyn Stacey will be on display.

Robyn Stacey with her work Lighthouse Wharf Hotel, Port Adelaide, 2016; photo: Daniel Boud

Samstag Museum  launches a three-year project, Adelaide//International – a new series of solo exhibitions and forums for the 2019, 2020 and 2021 Adelaide Festivals. In 2019 Brook Andrew and Eugenia Lim will be joined by international artists Lisa Reihana (New Zealand) and Ming Wong (Singapore). Showing 28 February – 17 March.

Also in Adelaide, ACE Open will premiere leading Australian artist Sally Smart’s installation, The Violet Ballet, as part of the 2019 Adelaide Festival (2 March – 27 April). The Violet Ballet continues Smart’s investigation into avant-garde dance company the Ballets Russes, and their experimental choreography, costume and theatre design in an immersive and layered installation.

One of the highlights of the calendar year is the TARNANTHI festival presented by the Art Gallery of SA and other Adelaide venues. It returns 18 – 27 October; The OzAsia Festival continues to play a significant role in introducing new contemporary arts from Asia to audiences in Australia, and will return again to Adelaide during October; while SALA (South Australia Living Artist festival) returns in August. Renowned artist Louise Haselton has been named SALA Festival featured artist for 2019

New South Wales & ACT

Wagga Wagga Art Gallery kicks off with Moving Histories // Future Projections (16 February – 12 May) and brings together some of Australia’s leading female contemporary artists working across screen-based media including Mikala Dwyer and Justene Williams, Amala Groom, Deborah Kelly, Kate Blackmore and Jacinta Tobin, Joan Ross, Soda_Jerk, Angelica Mesiti and Caroline Garcia. Curated by Kelly Doley and Diana Smith of collaborative artist group, Barbara Cleveland, the exhibition explores invisible pasts, forgotten narratives and repressed memories, reminding us how history is fractured by race, class and gender.

It will also present the touring exhibition of The National Contemporary Jewellery Award (9 February –31 March), now in its 30th year. The biannual Award is Griffith Regional Art Gallery’s flagship exhibition; and the two solo exhibitions Ruth Cummins: Tidying Down – which responds to contemporary advice literature surrounding domestic order – and abstract artist Ann Rayment: Through my eyes: Australia Landscape, both through March.

Lismore Regional Gallery opens the year with the solo exhibitions, Riverstones and Ramifications: Bronwyn Bancroft and Between Nature and Sin: David Griggs, until 24 February.

David Griggs, Zoloft Nation, 2009 showing at Lismore Regional Gallery.

The highlight of Hazelhurst Arts Centre 2019 program is RococoColonial (4 May to 30 June),  curated by artist Gary Carsely with Carrie Kibbler and Sarah Gurich. In the art of the Rococo, play and life are indistinguishable and radically new concept of reality. Many contemporary Australian artists are using similar approaches to question the political, cultural and economic realities of our time and navigate the experiences of increasing inequality, environmental degradation and growing intolerance. RococoColonial is a partnership project between Hazelhurst Arts Centre and Bathurst Regional Gallery.

Bundanon Trust, Arthur Boyd’s home on the south coast, has engaged curator Barry Pearce to develop a touring exhibition from their collection. Pearce has focused on landscape – both actual and psychological – for Arthur Boyd: Landscape of the Soul, which opened this month at NAS Gallery in Sydney (until 9 March) and will travel regional Australia until 2020.  Check out local dates.

Wollongong Art Gallery has partnered with 4A to delve through more than a century of the Dion family history, an indelible part of the Illawarra’s social fabric as members of the Chinese diaspora and operators of the region’s bus services: On the Move tells a story of migration, survival, acceptance and community spirit of a remarkable family through archival material and responses from contemporary artists. 30 November 2019 – 23 February, it is curated by Pedro de Almeida and Mikala Tai.

Campbelltown Art Centre’s first exhibition for 2019 presents an all-female exhibition, Borrowed Scenery, which explores what happens when the subjects of this gaze look back, step outside the frame, and assert their own vision and experience of the world (until 10 March).It is followed by the retrospective by Suzanne Archer: Song of the Cicada (22 March – 5 May) looking at five decades of her practice as a painter, sculptor and installation artist.

Later in the year comes an equally probing exhibition, How to: Democracy (17 May – 31 July) which engages mid-career Australian artists to respond to the changing commentary of democracy in Australia’s current political climate with new commissioned works.

And opening 17 August, Campbelltown brings together women of iTaukei (Indigenous Fijian) heritage in Western Sydney with iTaukei female artists from Australia and New Zealand in a collaborative exhibition, ERA YALOVATA NA MARAMA (Fijian Women Gathered Together).

Sodeisha ceramics, Newcastle Art Gallery collection

To the north, Newcastle Art Gallery has a win with its exhibition SODEISHA: connected to Australia, the gallery receiving a $40,000 Dobell Exhibition Grant from Museums and Galleries (MGNSW) to develop. (2 March to 19 May). It dives deep into their unique collection of Japanese Sodeisha ceramics, and how it has a dialogue with contemporary ceramic artists today.

The Gallery hosted its first Sodeisha exhibition in September 1979. ‘After the exhibition completed a tour of six capital cities, the Sodeisha group elected to gift 58 of the 62 works exhibited to Newcastle Art Gallery,’ said Gallery Director Lauretta Morton. ‘This generous gift means that our Gallery holds one of the largest collections of Sodeisha ceramics by this important group of artists outside Japan … Sodeisha artists were ground breakers  revolutionaries if you will  and they have forever impacted on the contemporary landscape of ceramics and art.’

Newcastle will also present the solo exhibition Virginia Cuppaidge: the nature of abstraction (11 May – 21 July), a survey of the last forty years of one of Australia’s foremost Abstract painters. The exhibition marks and celebrates Cuppaidge’s return to Australia after four decades in New York.

It is followed by another two solo exhibitions; that of much celebrated Newcastle-based artist James Drinkwater, The sea calls me by name (1 June – 11 August); and Robert Dickerson: Off the Canvas (24 August – 3 November), which celebrates a major new donation to Newcastle Art Gallery of 40 paintings by Dickerson with works of art dating 1995-2005. 

Ella Dreyfus, SB 2005, 2012, 2019, courtesy the artist 

Across town at Watt Space Gallery, University of Newcastle (1 May – 2 June), photographer and artist Ella Dreyfus will show Under Twenty-Seven  a series of portraits depicting the same group of men as they evolve from childhood into adulthood, The sensitive and poignant portraits address contemporary concepts of masculinity.

The Lock-Up in Newcastle will exhibit I love you Melissa (1 June – 21 July) which uses words found graffitied on a cell wall at The Lock-Up as a muse, to explore the complexities of love though the work of eight contemporary artists.

Jodie Whalen’s installation Declaration of Love, 2016; courtesy the artist and The Lock-Up

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery celebrates 50 years of support in 2019 with the exhibition BRAGS 50 Years: The Art of Giving (15 February – 7 April. That fifty years has contributed over 70 significant artworks to the collection. It is paired with the exhibition Seeing Voices, which uses the Monash University Collection as a springboard to explore how the voice is visualised in contemporary art through drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, video, and live performance. Artist include: Damiano Bertoli, Erik Bünger, Catherine or Kate, Michael Cook, Fayen d’Evie & Bryan Phillips, Léuli Eshraghi, Alicia Frankovich, Susan Hiller, Alex Martinis Roe, Angelica Mesiti, Clinton Nain and Rose Nolan. A NETS touring exhibition.

Also worth catching is Wendy Murray: Night & Day (15 February – 7 April) which features a selection of her series of over 300 daily drawings, and works completed during her second Hill End Residency undertaken in 2018.

Out west, Orange Regional Gallery highlights the work of Utopia artist, Margaret Loy Pula with her exhibition Anatye (the bush potato or yam), paintings that depict an aerial view of the growth pattern of the plant. (9 February – 24 March)

The Lismore Art Gallery also turns to opening the year with a solo exhibition. Hey, Listen Up: Amanda Bromfield (16 February – 31 March) champions the empowerment of women through storytelling. These objects include handmade ceramic flowers, life size women’s undergarments and large-scale sculptures that represent women. The inclusion of women’s craft, references both the labour of love, and the low value assigned to traditional women’s art and ‘work’ and, the unpaid hours of domestic servitude of past generations of women.

At the same time they are presenting the work of David Kemp – The Terania Creek Protest, where in 1979 people formed a human shield to protect an environmental wonder. The protest represented the first time the presence of protesters challenged the government’s authority over forests and stopped a logging operation.

The theme of protest continued in March with Rhythm of Protest: Lawrence English – a major exhibition of new work by the Brisbane-based artist exploring themes of the shifting role sound plays in protest and public assembly (2 March – 7 April). The works also acknowledge the Northern Rivers as an important site of historic and continued protest, and will sit alongside an exhibition of documentation of the 1979 Terania Creek rainforest protest.

And Lismore rounds out its program for 2019 with Paperbark: Lionel Bawden (6 April – 12 May). Living in the Northern Rivers for a number of years, Bawden has turned his attention to trees as a core symbol of his connection to the region. The exhibition is created in part during Bawden’s residency at Lismore Regional Gallery in The Binns Artist Studio in early 2019.

Continuing until 24 March at Penrith Regional Gallery is the major exhibition The Ideal Home featuring 70 objects from the MAAS collection and a number of newly-commissioned artworks exploring the Australian experience of home over the last century.

eX De Medici, The Seat of Love and Hate, courtesy the artist; The Ideal Home, Penrith Art Gallery

The Canberra Museum and Art Gallery takes a look at Canberra’s flag – yes it has one, which has flown on poles for the past 25 years. Why does it look like and what does it mean to the ACT. A flag of our own (9 February – 4 May); while across town at the Drill Hall Gallery, at ANU, the year gets going with a serious look at The Hassall Colleciton (22 February – 14 April) which looks at the play of analogies, rapports and apparent convergences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artworks in private collecting.

It is followed later in the year by a string of solo exhibitions: Raquel Ormella, Elizabeth Cross, Ildako Kovacs, a survey of Savanhdary Vongpoothorn and Steven Harvey wrapping up the year. It is a serious commitment to showing artists living and working in Australia.

Tasmania

Devonport Regional Gallery presents Littoral – the first major airing for several years of Devonport Regional Gallery’s collection of ceramics, and is timed to coincide with The Australian Ceramics Triennale Tasmania 2019. The works selected were made by ceramic artists living in Tasmania or who have worked or studied here. Its been curated by Marilyn Raw. (2 March – 2 June).

Ten Days on the Island returns in March. 2019 is the 10th anniversary of the Tassie event / festival. This state-wide festival will launch its full program at the end of January. It has been reimagined as an epic adventure over three weekends across three Tasmanian heartlands. It said: ‘We’re also signalling some exciting changes to the way you’ll experience your Festival, unveiling our new design and colours, and welcoming you to our new improved website. In many ways the 10th Festival will set a new direction for the next decades of Ten Days on the Island.’

On 8 March (which just happens to be International Women’s Day) the festival open in the North West, in Burnie, Ten Days on the Island’s new home base. The second weekend in the North East will be full of earthly delights will have a baroque tone, while music is at the heart of the third weekend in Hobart.

While not part of the regional gallery network, we have included Michael Cook’s exhibition The Mission at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), for its remoteness. Making art is Michael Cook’s way of better understanding both Aboriginal culture and racial prejudice in Australia. The Mission traces the journey of an Aboriginal woman from her homeland to a Christian mission, created using a range of archival imagery, including family photographs and documents from his personal collection. Until 3 March.

Northern Territory

An exhibition that caught our eye was Fecund: Fertile Worlds, presented by the Arulen Arts Centre. Curated by the inaugural SPARK NT Curator, Katherine-based Clare Armitage is brings together works by contemporary artists from across the NT and Australia who explores life, death and desire in the natural world. Fecund also acknowledges the resilience of life, the interconnectedness of living systems and the will to exist. (until 3 February).

The 13th Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair is scheduled for 9 – 11 August and Desert Mob 2019 will be presented in Alice Springs from 5-7 September – this year coinciding with the Museums & Galleries National Conference.

Gina Fairley is ArtsHub's National Visual Arts Editor. For a decade she worked as a freelance writer and curator across Southeast Asia and was previously the Regional Contributing Editor for Hong Kong based magazines Asian Art News and World Sculpture News. Prior to writing she worked as an arts manager in America and Australia for 14 years, including the regional gallery, biennale and commercial sectors. She is based in Mittagong, regional NSW. Twitter: @ginafairley Instagram: fairleygina