Tate Modern showed eighty works by Emily Kam Kngwarray together in Europe for the first time, made in her late seventies and eighties in the Utopia homelands.
Tate Modern at Bankside showed 80 works by the Aboriginal Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray from Thursday 10 July 2025 to Sunday 11 January 2026. Her work represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1997.
Kngwarray was born around 1910 at Alhalkere, in the Utopia homelands of Australia’s Northern Territory. She began working in batik in 1977.
She took up painting on canvas in 1988, in her late seventies, and painted for the eight years until her death in 1996. She also made etchings and linocuts in the early 1990s, and never left her community despite national fame.
Her paintings layer motifs for the vines, seeds, lizards and emus of the desert around her. They carry stories and knowledge held over generations.
The exhibition brought the works together in Europe for the first time, with film and audio telling her story. Tate Modern and the National Gallery of Australia organised it, based on a show curated by Kelli Cole and Hetti Perkins.
Cole is of the Warumungu and Luritja peoples, and Perkins of the Arrernte and Kalkadoon peoples. Cole curated the London presentation, with research supported by the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational.