The exhibition opens with a display of vibrant ceramics in the gallery’s third-floor foyer. These convey Tiwi ancestral stories such as Murtankala (who created Melville and Bathurst Islands) and aspects of modern life. The elegant cases that house the works set the tone for the airy and seemingly light-filled spaces that greet the viewer within the galleries, invigorated by the works’ characteristic Tiwi pwanga (dots), marlipinyini (lines), and turtiyanginari (ochre colours). The works seem to jostle and dance against the backdrop of the traditional white cube (or as close to it as the interior of LAB Architecture’s gallery spaces get). This is an experience enhanced and guided by exhibition design, not overwhelmed by it. The way in which the display architecture leads us through the space encourages a physical as well as intellectual engagement with the art, one that also manages to foreground the importance to Tiwi culture of the songs and dances of the kulama and pukumani ceremonies, which respectively mark the coming of age and the passing of members of the community. As curator Judith Ryan writes in the exhibition publication:

Tiwi art retains its intimate connection with song and dance and with jilamara, the idiosyncratic painted designs with which performers celebrate kulama and conceal their identity from mapurtiti in pukumani ceremonies. For Tiwi people, kawakawini-mi youi-mi jilamara-mi (to sing is to dance is to paint) or, as artist Chris Tipiloura phrased it, ‘nginingilawa jilamaram nginiyi parlingarri pirripapukiya turti-yanginari (painting is about painting oneself with ochre)’. A painted design on any surface has deep associations with singing and dancing and elements of Tiwi language and culture that are non-verbal. Dancing in ceremonial contexts suggests complex understandings of time, causation and kinship connections. It summons up participant and spectator energy, choreographing and negotiating the public space, geographic location, land, spirituality and embodiment.

Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, Tiwi c. 1940 –2013, Purrukuparli and Wai-ai, 1991, earth pigments on canvas, 60.5 x 82.0 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Anthony and Beverly Knight through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2019 © Jean Baptiste Apuatimi / Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia

With works spanning from 1911 to today across a range of media (painting, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, textile design, and video), the exhibition is not chronological, allowing one to move between the past and present and to comprehend, as Ryan notes, the way in which Tiwi ‘emphasise and value innovation and independence in carving and painting, rather than reproducing inherited and encoded totemic designs that accord with lines of descent or kinship systems’. As the extraordinary ‘signature’ works of well-known artists such as Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, Timothy Cook, Kutuwulumi Purawarrumpatu Kitty Kantilla, and Pedro Wonaeamirri attest (to name but a few), artistic individuality and stylistic ingenuity are prized and celebrated. As Pedro Wonaeamirri explains, individual artists create work that is nginingilawa, which means ‘mine and no-one else’s. It belongs to me and is all from me.’

This sense of an interconnected but unique vision is also witnessed in the exciting work of relative ‘newcomer’ Johnathon World Peace Bush. Bush’s large-scale paintings combine figuration, gesture, and Tiwi lines, circles and cross-hatching in compositions that meld Tiwi iconography with that of the Catholic Church. This is a poignant reminder of the impact of the establishment of missions at Wurrumiyanga in 1911 and at Pirlangimpi in 1940; the latter housed Indigenous children of the Stolen Generations. While Bush’s paintings embody the inherent tension between these ancient and introduced belief systems, the two coexist for many Tiwi today, exemplified by the Christian crosses that often populate the landscape alongside tutini (burial poles) at pukamani sites and the symbolic presence of Christian crosses and haloes in the paintings of artists such as Timothy Cook.

The history and legacy of collecting Tiwi work plays an important role within the exhibition and the accompanying publication. The inclusion of a selection of significant early tunga (stringybark containers once used for carrying food and water) and tutini from Museums Victoria, collected by anthropologist (and later, honorary director of the National Museum of Victoria) Baldwin Spencer on two separate visits to the Islands in 1911 and 1912, and of the stunning group of barks and tunga collected by C.P. Mountford in 1954 and now housed in the South Australian Museum, enables the viewer to see connections between the bold jilimara (painting and design) of these early works and those of contemporary artists. Far removed from community, and primarily accessed through reproduction, these historic works simultaneously act as both a vital point of connection and as a springboard for new interpretations. Indeed, examples from the Mountford collection influenced the suite of prints colloquially known as the ‘Mountford Project’ that were created by artists Maryanne Mungatopi, Janice Murray Pungautiji, and Pedro Wonaeamirri at the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne in 2000 after they had studied the works in storage in the South Australian Museum. As Johnathon World Peace Bush states:

Parlingarri is the past, the memory of the past, the history of the past and is everything that makes up our story. All the experiences of our ancestors, the goddess and the moon man: everything that came before makes the present, the now and us people.

Installation view of TIWI on display at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne from 23 November 2020 – 8 March 2021. Photo: Tom Ross

Important shifts in museological understanding, consideration and appreciation of these objects as art are also represented by the group of tutini commissioned by Dr Stuart Scougall and artist and deputy director Tony Tuckson for the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1958 (which comprised the first display of Indigenous cultural objects as a form of artistic expression in an Australian art museum) and by the group of tutini displayed at the opening of the National Gallery of Victoria a decade later (which were formally acquired in 1970). From this relatively modest and comparatively late beginning, the NGV cemented its now longstanding commitment to the work of Tiwi artists through the commissioning of fifty-five paintings on bark by eighteen different artists from Jilimara Arts in 1991. This impressive body of work is now the cornerstone of the Gallery’s more expansive Tiwi holdings.

Accompanying TIWI is TIWI: Art & Artists, a major publication that brings together a number of perspectives and expert voices. Elegantly designed, lavishly illustrated, and very readable, it will serve as an important reference tool for many years to come.

TIWI, the last exhibition that Judith Ryan, Senior Curator of Indigenous Art, will curate at the NGV, marks the end of an era. As the future of this significant collection is rightly handed over to First Nations curators, the Gallery’s outstanding collection remains testament to Ryan’s commitment to Indigenous art, its scholarship and dissemination, over her forty-plus years in the role.

TIWI continues at NGV Australia until 8 March 2021. Tiwi: Art and Artists (NGV, $69.95 hb) is edited by Judith Ryan.

This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.