As an Emily Kam Kngwarray survey opens at Tate Modern this week, contemporary Indigenous artists are finally taking centre stage in the UK – The Art Newspaper

After two decades of broadening the artistic canon, Tate Modern’s most overt collecting and programming priority today is in the field of Indigenous practices. Following the launch of an Indigenous fund last year, the director of Tate Modern, Karin Hindsbo, told The Art Newspaper’s podcast The Week in Art: “We are not only going to display more, we are also going to see ways to be inspired by the Indigenous practices, in terms of thinking of community, thinking of sustainability.”

A project that Hindsbo sees as emblematic of this development—one that is, as she says, at the “very core” of Tate Modern’s programme as it celebrates its 25th anniversary—opens this week: the first major exhibition of the Indigenous Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray (around 1914-96). The Anmatyerr painter made extraordinarily dynamic and moving paintings and batiks of the desert region of Alhalker in Australia’s Northern Territory.

Tate’s exhibition is a variation of a show that began at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra last year. It features more than 70 works, from Kngwarray’s early batiks, begun in 1977, through to the vast paintings that she made towards the end of her life. Those practices were deeply informed by the body painting in awely, the ceremonial traditions of Kngwarray’s community.“The tactility of [Kngwarray’s] work, particularly in the paintings as well as in the batiks, stems from the gesture of painting on the body, using ochres for awely [ceremonies],” says Hetti Perkins, who, with Kelli Cole, was one of the two Indigenous Australian curators of the exhibition when it was at the National Gallery of Australia

Flora and fauna

All these forms of visual expression depicted the flora and fauna of Alhalker, an area north-east of Alice Springs, next to the more famous Indigenous homeland of Utopia. “She starts with [all the edible foods from the area] and then she also depicts other amazing and wonderful connected subjects from her cultural knowledge,” says Cole, who is co-curating the Tate version of the show

From her first painting on canvas, Emu woman (1988-89), “you [could] see she was such a special, amazing artist”, Cole says. “That painting is extraordinary.” Her output in the years between Emu woman and her last paintings was astonishing—the final painting in the Tate show, the nearly 5m-wide Yam awely (1995), was created in just two days. And Kngwarray made giant stylistic leaps across this short period, too: the dots of Emu woman give way to loose and energetic loops and fluid lines in later canvases.

Context-faithful

These final paintings are often framed within the context of abstraction. But Cole and her collaborators avoid aligning Kngwarray’s achievement with the values of Western art and decontextualising her paintings by, for example, presenting them as an Indigenous Abstract Expressionism. “Our goal is, and always has been… to work with the community, have the community’s voices really included in this,” Cole says.

There are further important Indigenous artist exhibitions in the UK this month with a London show of Duane Linklater, from the Moose Cree First Nation in Ontario, Canada, and a Manchester exhibition of Santiago Yahuarcani, who is from the Aimeni (White Heron) clan of the Uitoto people in northern Peru.

The Camden Art Centre’s exhibition is a family affair: the protagonist is Duane Linklater, but alongside him is work by his grandmother, Ethel (Trapper) Linklater; his son Tobias; and his partner, the artist and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater, who collaborates with Duane under the name Grey Plumes. The exhibition has been organised by the New Curators—a group from a one-year training programme, founded by the Tate alumni Mark Godfrey and Kerryn Greenberg, for young curators from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

The centrepiece of the show, according to Issra Marie Martin, speaking on behalf of the New Curators cohort, is Speculative apparatus for the work of nohkompan and nikosis (2016), a sculptural structure acquired by Tate in 2020, which, in its fullest form, includes Trapper Linklater’s work, lent by the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in Ontario.

Martin suggests that the exhibition will challenge expectations about artists from Indigenous backgrounds. The show foregrounds “discussions of authorship and memory and power as it relates to being an artist, being someone who creates, and [to] museum institutions”. And while there are “reckonings with colonial histories”, she says, “there’s a lot of institutional critique [of the kind] that we’ve seen in a lot of conceptual art, and art historical references [too].”

A new Grey Plumes ceramic work features vessels from the artist’s Sugpiaq community that have been remade in order to question “the controversial excavation of these pots, what it means for them to be owned or within a museum space, and what it means to encounter them within a contemporary art gallery”, Martin says.

Epic visions

Among the most scintillating moments of Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition at the Venice Biennale last year was the pairing of Santiago Yahuarcani with his son Rember. The work of the Uitoto artists, from Pebas in northern Peru, depicts epic visions of their land, its people and animals, and complex forms of ancestral knowledge. Santiago’s works from that exhibition, along with many others—30 in total—are part of an exhibition at the Whitworth in Manchester, his first international survey.

“They are extraordinary, completely outside of the Western canon,” says the curator Darren Pih. “But [the work] also tells you about this parallel universe of Indigenous knowledge, storytelling and wisdom, and [shows a] deep appreciation and knowledge of medicinal plants—that are regarded as being sacred—and also the painful histories of colonialism.”

The Uitoto community was particularly affected by the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which ultimately led to the Putumayo genocide that devastated the Indigenous population. These complex themes are reflected in the way that Yahuarcani depicts the “spirit creatures” that populate his paintings, including the pink river dolphin, a guardian of the water world in Uitoto cosmology, which shapeshifts after colonialism.

Most visitors are likely to be new to Uitoto culture, but Yahuarcani’s work is “very accessible”, Pih says. “Fundamentally, it’s about storytelling. It’s about ancestral knowledge from his grandfather and his mother, who experienced the Putumayo genocide,” the curator explains. “But they’re not angry works. There’s a clear-eyed story-telling component [that says]: ‘this is what our people have experienced, and we can all learn from this.’”

• Emily Kam Kngwarray, Tate Modern, London, 10 July-11 January 2026

• Akâmi: Duane Linklater, Ethel (Trapper) Linklater, Tobias Linklater and Grey Plumes, Camden Art Centre, London, until 21 September

• Santiago Yahuarcani: the Beginning of Knowledge, The Whitworth, Manchester, until 4 January 2026