Emily Kame Kngwarreye at Tate Modern: Exhibiting Indigenous Art in Europe

Tomorrow, July 10, 2025, the Tate Modern will open its doors to a groundbreaking exhibition of Indigenous Australian artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, representing a critical advancement for Indigenous artists within the international art scene while highlighting Australia’s ongoing struggle to come to terms with its colonial history.  

Picking up a paint brush for the first time when she was in her eighties, Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s (1910-1996) rise to artistic stardom was swift and fuelled by the art world’s ‘discovery’ of Indigenous art and exalting it to what Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes described as ‘the last great art movement of the 20th century’.¹

Figure 1: My Country In Bloom (1992)

Born and raised in Utopia, a remote desert area 230 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, Kngwarreye’s contact with the outside world was sporadic, although, contrary to narratives that seek to place her within the isolated native paradigm, the languages of the Anmatyerre people, and their closely related neighbours, the Alyawarra, is linguistically similar to Arrernte and Kaytatye in the Arandic language group. It is therefore unlikely that Kngwarreye never travelled throughout the region to trade or connect with her extended desert family. Contrary to these misconceptions, Kngwarreye was a respected senior Anmatyerre Elder and custodian of religious and cultural knowledge that she shared with her community and visitors from surrounding nations.² Her work, totaling over 3,000 canvases produced in just eight years, is the materialisation of this knowledge and expresses her identification with the land and past and present generations of her people.

Kngwarreye never went to art school, or any traditional school for that matter, she knew of no art books, journals or newspapers, she had no studio and did not work at an easel or table. Instead, she sat on the ground, protected from the harsh sun and winds by a corrugated iron shelter (an image familiar to all Australians), and painted her one and only subject – Anmatyerre country, the country of the yam and the emu. Nevertheless, her lack of exposure to the history of art, that is the history of Western art, is perhaps what makes her work so compelling – it is entirely her own visual language informed by her own Indigenous cultural roots.³ It is this specificity that makes Tate’s upcoming exhibition one of the most important art events of the year and a defining moment in the history of international exhibitions of Indigenous artists.

Figure 2: Untitled (Alhalker) (1989)

After receiving her first solo exhibition in 1990 at Utopia Art Sydney, Kngwarreye represented Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and, in 1998, the Queensland Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria each held the first retrospective of her work in a travelling exhibition titled Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia. It was in Alhalkere that the practice of exhibiting Indigenous artist’s work in a manner that creates cultural difference and forces anthropological scrutiny was highlighted as one of the exhibition's central issues. The accompanying catalogue expanded on this and how our existing framework for artistic interpretation and critique are not adequate to the work of Kngwarreye and other Indigenous Australian artists. In the end, any attempt to understand such works through a Eurocentric framework is to assimilate it to Eurocentric standards and culture, and, in the process, lose all that makes it important. 

A decade later, Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, opened at Japan’s National Museum of Art, Osaka and National Art Center, Tokyo, before travelling to the National Museum of Australia. Like Alhalkere, curators of Utopia attempted to “resolve the persistent need to reconcile the abstract canvases produced by an elderly black woman from the desert with the Western conception of modernism” along with the “critical issue of how to pluck a single Indigenous artist from a community collective environment and present her work using a European model of the monograph in white spaces”.⁴ Unlike Alhalkere, however, this was done in the wake of the Apology to the Stolen Generations which only underscored how little progress in such conversations had been made and, unfortunately, European art and artists remain the yardstick against which all others are to be measured. Almost two decades on, the art world waits to see whether Tate will make the same ill-fated attempt to marry Aboriginality with Eurocentrism or if this exhibition will be a turning point for Indigenous art on a global scale for the second quatre of the century.

Figure 3: Yam awely (1995)

Tate has, for the past several years, been on a mission to extend their international reach and connect with global audiences through partnering with institutional peers to host exhibitions, commissions and multi-media projects. In 2015, an AUD$2.75 million gift from Qantas made possible a five-year program, the International Joint Acquisition Program (IJAP), established between Tate and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, for cultural exchange and educating audiences on the oldest continuous cultures on earth. IJAP resulted in the acquisition of 35 artworks by 24 artists for the collections of Tate and MCA which were seen in Richard Bell: Embassy (2023) installed on Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall Bridge and the exhibition A Year in Art: Australia 1992 (2021-23) which, through its display of 25 works, sought to “examine debates around land rights and the ongoing legacies of colonialism” in relation to the 1992 overturning of the ‘terra nullius’ doctrine, but did so in the same struggle against a Eurocentric framework of interpretation met by earlier exhibitions.⁵

Emily Kam Kngwarray, is the manifestation of another partnership between Tate and Australia’s National Gallery and its display of 70 works will, directly or indirectly, pick up where A Year in Art left off and, being the first major retrospective of Kngwarreye’s work in Europe, its failure to reckon with ongoing debates will be catastrophic to the audience’s understanding of her work.

Figure 4: Untitled (1992)

As revealed by these and other previous exhibitions, simply shipping the work of Indigenous artists to Europe and displaying them in the white-cube spaces of European galleries is not enough to contend with the Eurocentrism that inevitably arises when Aboriginality is contextualised by European systems of knowledge, interpretation and history. Such practice renders the artworks anthropological, remnants of pre-civilisation the be gawked at by an audience unable to understand its true significance and meaning, and thus solidifies the artist’s position as colonised Other.

As curator Margo Neale notes, when the work of Indigenous artists is contextualised with Eurocentric systems of knowledge, they are subject to “a cultural warp” whereby the meaning is bent and stretched until it is able to be understood by an audience who has no knowledge of the culture and history they are seeing. For the work of Kngwarreye this begins at the very basis of our artistic language, for her work, interpreted by the language of Abstraction, can only be considered as such in the Western sense of the word. Neale states that this same paradox is met by any categories applied to her work because it requires the responsibilities of her role as Anmatyerre Elder and the traditional aspects of her practice, and its origins in body decoration, ceremonial performance and song, to be overlooked in favour of its visual qualities which are further evaluated through comparison with EuroAmerican art history. Nevertheless, the biggest conundrum raised by the exhibition will, perhaps, be unknown to its largely British audience – the spelling on her name.

Figure 5: Anwerlarr (Pencil yam) (1989)

In 2023 the National Gallery of Australia, with whom Tate have partnered, made the decision to change the spelling to Emily Kam Kngwarray, in response to consultation with Utopia community members and sign language scholar Dr Jennifer Green who, although not Indigenous herself and unable to speak the Anmatyerre language, published the Central & Eastern Anmatyerr to English Dictionary in 2010. Neale, who is now Senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia and head of the Centre for Indigenous Knowledges, stated that this “went against the artist’s express wishes” and that it was of “paramount importance” for her to retain the name that the world had come to know her as. “She was always adamant that her name must stay the same, because that was her artist’s name”, Neale explained, “She was very clear on this. She was aware that the linguists might try to change her name as they did for other artists who passed away. She said ‘my name stays the same because I am famous for that name’ and she was in a very clear mind about this”. Green, however, dismissed these concerns as she “could not read English or written forms of her own language”, and claims she had any opinions regarding the spelling of her names are therefore “not credible”.⁶ Yet one has to wonder if Green has questioned the credibility of her own work given that she is illiterate in the Anmatyerre language and therefore cannot be considered a credible source of knowledge of its spelling. The same resentment for the change was felt by Christopher Hodges, director of Utopia Art Sydney, who also worked closely with Kngwarreye during her life. While acknowledging “Kngwarreye wrote no language, spelling was of little interest to her”, Hodges argued that “the same spelling was used throughout her career and she recognised it visually … The speaking of the words and the use of her image that were agreed upon were to continue posthumously. We had no idea that over a decade later a linguist would rewrite the spelling … and then seek to apply it posthumously”.⁷ 

Yet it is in Green’s final statement that the change as a continuation of Eurocentric paradigms can be seen most. “I do not think a question to Kngwarray about whether she preferred one spelling or another would have made any sense to her”, she declared, insinuating that Kngwarreye’s illiteracy would render her unable to comprehend the notion of a written name and that therefore such changes are only trivial to her legacy.⁸ The autocratic decision to change her name, made by a group of people located some 2,800 kilometres away from her home, most of whom did not know the artist, is remarkably similar to the colonising practice of forcing First Nations Peoples to adopt a European name, in stripping them of their right to choose and dictating if and how their ancestral language be used.

Tate’s decision to mount the exhibition using the NGA’s new spelling, while undoubtably part of their partnership agreement, is not one that has been followed by most of Australia’s other state and national galleries, nor many other art centres across the country. As such, confusion will only be compounded as Australia’s inability to reconcile with its colonial past is highlighted on a global stage alongside the enduring, although sometimes inadvertent, Eurocentric practices of modern museums.

1. Margo Neale, ed., Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2008), 217, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, shown at the National Museum of Australia, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and National Art Center, Tokyo.

2. Jennifer Isaacs, “Anmatyerre Woman”, in Emily Kngwarreye - Paintings (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1998), 12-16.

3. Tony Ellwood, “Reflecting on Emily: A personal response” in Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, ed. Margo Neale (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2008), 19-22, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, shown at the National Museum of Australia, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and National Art Center, Tokyo.

4. Neale, Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

5. Tate, “A Year in Art: Australia 1992”, Tate Press release, June 7, 2021, https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/year-art-australia-1992-0

6. Kelly Burke, “Art world split over NGA name change for one of Australia’s greatest female painters”, The Guardian, December 23, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/23/art-world-split-over-nga-name-change-for-one-of-australias-greatest-female-painters

7. Burke, “Art world split over NGA name change for one of Australia’s greatest female painters”.

8. ibid.

Figure 1: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, My Country In Bloom (1992). Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 122 x 303 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia.

Figure 2: Emily Kame Kngwarray, Untitled (Alhalker) (1989). Acrylic on canvas, 120.4 x 89.7 cm. Tate, U.K.

Figure 3: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Anmatyerr people, Yam awely (1995). Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 152 x 490 cm. National Gallery of Australia.

Figure 4: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Untitled (1992). Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 134.1 x 135.3 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia.

Figure 5: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Anwerlarr (Pencil yam) (1989). Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 151.2 x 91.1 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.