JOSPEH WILLIAMS JUNGURAYI, Lightning man, 2024. Oil on canvas. 112 x 99cm.

For over a hundred years, the Warumungu people experienced the Telegraph Station in contradictory terms of a double consciousness – of dispossession and repossession, of the loss of traditional patterns of life but the gain of modern patterns from which they would wrest a Warumungu modernism, and more recently, artistic revivals of this modernism.

Joseph Williams Jungarayi refers to this as “future-past” – a re-modernism which is also present in his own work. By utilising museum collections, schematic drawings depicting mining operations on Warumungu land, and detailed re-illustrations of Spencer’s Warumungu photography, Williams unveils layers of the past interwoven with the present.

Featuring: artists from Papunya Tjupi.