What might it mean to view Indigenous aesthetics and intercultural cosmopolitanisms not from entrenched metropolitan perspectives of Sydney, London or New York but from the so-called ‘remote’communities such as Hermannsburg, Amata or the town camps of Alice Springs? What does it mean to take seriously the demands of desert Aboriginal artists to represent themselves and their practice politically and culturally; to develop desert Aboriginal art history, to model art theory and shape public debate?

We are in Wonder LAND Symposium is a one-day event exploring the 2015 NIEA-Desart-UNSW Galleries exhibition We are in Wonder LAND: new experimental art from Central Australia (15 May – 15 August 2015) and the Cicada Press Wonder LAND Artists-in-Residency (March 2015).

Convened by Dr Jennifer Biddle and Dr Lisa Stefanoff  (NIEA, UNSW Art & Design), the symposium presents for the first time to a Sydney audience, the innovation, dynamism and activism of an emergent ‘remote’ Central and Western desert avant-garde whose innovative art-making and emergent aesthetics is literally life-making: revivifying threatened vernacular languages, cultural traditions and intangible heritage and requiring new forms of engagement and encounter. 

We are in Wonder LAND Symposium provides a unique opportunity to hear directly from leading desert artists and other leading Indigenous curators, scholars and artists about the vital importance of new trajectories of tradition and experimentation shaping desert futures today. 

Keynote Speakers

Nyurpaya Kaika Burton is a senior Pitjantjatjara artist who lives and works in Amata in South Australia.  She is a painter and sculptor for Tjala Arts; a sculptor and fibre-innovator for Tjanpi Desert Weavers, and a bilingual writer, featured most recently in Art and Australia in May 2014.

Wanta Steve Jampijinpa Patrick is a bicultural educator and researcher who lives and works in Lajamanu in the Northern Territory.  He is creative Director of Milpirri, the Warlpiri biennale produced in conjunction with Tracks Dance Company since 2005 and ARC Fellow in the School of Music, Australian National University.

Free and open to the public. Registration Essential. Please visit the Eventbrite page for registration. 

Enquiries about the symposium can be directed to niea@unsw.edu.au

We are in Wonder LAND partners: Desart Inc.; National Institute for Experimental Arts and Cicada Press. 

We are in Wonder LAND is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australian Research Council.

Desart Inc. is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, Northern Territory Government, the Australian Government Indigenous Visual Arts Industry Support Program and the Australian Government Visual Arts and Craft Strategy.