Welcome to Perth Festival 2025 Exhibitions program
We are privileged to present a program that brings major international artists into conversation with Western Australia's own extraordinary artistic voices. These works can be experienced in galleries all around the city. Each offers an invitation to engage – whether through deep contemplation, visceral response or unexpected moments of recognition. Some of these artists confront urgent social and political realities, others navigate memory and mythology, while some create spaces of quiet resistance or radical beauty. Together, they remind us of art’s capacity to hold contradiction, to sit in complexity and to generate meaning beyond words. At a time when the world can feel increasingly fractured, the works across our Exhibitions program remind us of the essential role art plays in making sense of it all. They speak across borders, generation and cultures, opening up space for dialogue and deeper understanding. Whether they challenge, soothe, provoke or inspire, they each hold a mirror to the world – reflecting back something urgent, unexpected or quietly profound.
An undertaking of this scale would not be possible without the curators, galleries and artists who have shaped these exhibitions with such care and ambition. My deepest thanks to them, and to the many hands behind the gallery walls who bring these projects to life. These exhibitions unfold across the city, each inviting you to step inside, linger a little longer and see the world from a fresh perspective. I encourage you to spend time with these works, to return to them, to let them shift something in you. The best encounters with art leave us altered in ways we don't always immediately understand. Those are the ones worth holding on to.
Anna Reece , Perth Festival Artistic Director
Judith Anya Samson Anya's Puntawarri World
A few years ago, I ran an artist dreams' workshop where participants pitched their hypothetical big vision project. Martu artist Judith Anya Samson said she wanted to create a whole world out of her paintings – Anya's world – where audiences could step inside her artwork and explore the different painterly elements that form her unique contemporary wayfinding. Fusing jukurrpa (Dreaming), Country and colonial history, Anya's world is a multilayered version of remote life in the mining region of the Pilbara, alongside an ancestral story of custodianship. Born in 1988 Anya was raised by her grandmother, moving to Jigalong as a young girl. She spent a lot of time travelling to her ancestral Country around the Rabbit Proof Fence areas, near Jigalong, and later moved to Newman for high school. She began painting at an early age and then later went on to work at Martumili Artists. In the unique aesthetic of her grandmother, Anya's gestural and seemingly abstract style is a series of codes and symbols relating to thousands of years of knowledge and the lived colonial experience of the Western Desert.
‘I was still a young girl, still crawling in the desert. It was nice there. Some other families lived there with us. We had some farm, some vegetables. We went schooling in Puntawarri at the school, learning ‘two way’ [teaching in both Martu Wangka and English, with a focus on local cultural and ecological knowledge]. We used to go and get some parnajarrpa (goanna) and turkey.’ – Judith Anya Samson (courtesy Martumili Artist) For many Martu, including Anya's family, Jigalong Mission was where traditional desert life came to an end and the transition to life in a cattle station began. More recently the colonial expansion of mining in the region adds another complexity to life, on top of 60,000 years of living history. Anya's work touches all these layers, jovially incorporating the magic gestures inherent in her personality. This exhibition demonstrates her ability to hold so much knowledge and responsibility while creating such joy on canvas. Anya opens her heart and you feel the warmth of her practice as you are surrounded by the elements of her paintings in this immersive installation.
Thanks to our Presentation Partners
perth centre for photography pcp
Emilia Galatis , Curator
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Presented with Martumili Artists and DADAA
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