Welcome to Perth Festival 2026 Exhibitions program
Perth Festival’s Exhibitions program this year moves like tides: pulling distant time into the now and pushing our sense of place, authorship and belonging into unfamiliar waters. Across galleries and spaces throughout the city, these works invite a gentle kind of attention. The program is bound by a set of shared enquiries. Several artists begin with land, with regions where a comparatively recent colonial chapter has left outsized marks on environment and community, and where the evidence of that disruption still sits in plain sight. Others look outward to the Indian Ocean as a living memory system, a map of routes, crossings, labour, trade and cultural exchange that has braided worlds together for centuries. First Nations’ perspectives deepen this oceanic frame, speaking to long histories of contact and adaptation, to relationships with visitors and with what travelled here – objects, plants, languages and ideas, arriving and being transformed. As you make your way around our city’s galleries, you’ll also encounter works that foreground inheritance and responsibility. A remarkable group of drawings is presented in public for the first time, carrying knowledge held and transmitted by cultural leaders, custodians and families connected to the original makers. Elsewhere, new sculptural forms are built through processes of sampling and reconstruction, fragments taken apart, recombined and made strange again. Painting is similarly reoriented
through East and Southeast Asian viewpoints, loosening the dominance of Western conventions and expanding the medium’s logic, rhythm and reference points. Together, these exhibitions offer a field of relationships – between past and present, between shoreline and inland, between what is remembered and what has been suppressed, between the local and the transnational. They invite us to stay with ambiguity, to notice the layers and to accept that understanding can be partial, emotional and still profoundly real. This program exists because of collaboration and trust between the Festival, artists, curators, galleries, fabricators, installers and producers, and the many people who do the detailed, often invisible, work that allows art to be experienced at its fullest. On behalf of the Festival we are grateful for these partnerships and for the ambition, care and rigour across every project – all in the support of these exceptional artists that we are honoured to collectively present. Take these exhibitions at your own pace. Drift, return, double back. Like our ocean, how you experience it is never the same; it keeps moving and it meets each of us differently.
Awakening Histories
Awakening Histories explores pre-colonial international relations between First Nations peoples of Australia and Southeast Asian seafarers from Makassar in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The exhibition features new artwork commissions and key loans by 27 artists and collectives whose works share stories of migration, trade and cultural exchange. These artworks highlight the roles of trepang (sea cucumber), trochus and turtle shells, tamarind trees, palm wine, textiles and praus (sailing vessels) in histories shared across the ocean. Through stories and song, they map interactions that have taken place across the north of this continent—from the Gulf of Carpentaria around Arnhem Land to Garamilla/Darwin (an area known as Marege to the sailors from Makassar) and beyond to the Kayu Djawa/Kimberley region. Among the exhibition’s new commissions is a photography installation by Makassan artist Aziziah Diah Aprilya, Under the Tamarind Tree (2025). In South Sulawesi, the tamarind tree is a living archive of cultural memory – its shade a space for gathering and its fruit essential to Makassan cooking. Completed while on residency in Perth as part of PICA’s BREEZE: Makassar-Perth
Artist-in-Residence Exchange program in 2025, Aziziah’s work traces the tamarind’s journey from South Sulawesi to northern Australia, where it became entwined in First Nations mourning practices and memory. Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, a Western Australian-based artist, draws on his Bugis ancestry to explore shared waters and spiritual archetypes. His drawing and sculptural practice, showcased in Awakening Histories with a carved crocodile Tanpa Sempadan (Without Borders) , interrogates borders – both physical and imagined. Through animal forms that traverse cultural and ecological worlds, Abdul-Rahman traces connections across time and legacy; celebrating the passing of knowledge through families and generations. Awakening Histories honours First Nations peoples’ longstanding histories of encounter and interaction with communities, technologies and ideas from across the seas. It foregrounds Indigenous sovereignty and ocean-centred storytelling, inviting audiences to celebrate Australia’s pre-colonial international relations from a global south perspective, and the lasting connections forged through reciprocity, respect and trade.
Anna Reece , Perth Festival Artistic Director
Thanks to our Presentation Partners
Presented with Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in association with Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne
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