Origins and Evolution
Marking its tenth anniversary, Adelaide’s Tarnanthi Festival has unveiled Too Deadly: Ten Years of Tarnanthi at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), running from 17 October 2025 to 18 January 2026. The exhibition gathers more than 200 works from the past decade, showcasing paintings, bark works, large-scale installations, and contemporary media. Since its inception in 2015, Tarnanthi has been a flagship celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creativity, positioning itself as one of Australia’s leading platforms for First Nations art.
Curator and Artistic Director Nici Cumpston described the festival’s evolution as “a decade of constant growth, ambition, and transformation,” emphasizing that Too Deadly is not a retrospective in the traditional sense, but “a living archive of resistance and renewal.” She explained that over ten years, Tarnanthi has fostered opportunities for “more than 9,000 First Nations artists at all stages of their careers, opening new pathways for creative talents.” This longevity has helped reframe how Indigenous art is viewed—less as an artifact of the past and more as an active participant in global artistic discourse.
Themes, Memory, and Indigenous Presence
A central theme of Too Deadly is that Indigenous art remains vibrantly engaged with the present, addressing both inherited trauma and contemporary realities. One of the show’s centerpiece works, Kuḻaṯa Tjuṯa (Many Spears)—first displayed in 2017—comprises hundreds of hand-carved spears and wooden vessels created by Anangu men and women. The installation reflects on the devastating legacy of nuclear testing on the APY Lands between 1953 and 1963, transforming collective pain into acts of cultural survival. As Cumpston put it, “these works hold both history and hope—they are not simply about what was lost, but about what continues.”
The exhibition also revisits projects like Kungka Kuṉpu(Strong Women), originally touring from 2022 to 2024, which celebrated the authority of senior women artists from the APY Lands. Their works—woven, painted, and sung—speak to the endurance of matriarchal strength and community knowledge. Cumpston noted that “Tarnanthi has its own ecology—ambitious, intergenerational, and embracing both emerging and established artists working in any medium.” This inclusive vision underscores the festival’s role as a catalyst for cultural exchange and renewal.
Reclaiming Space and Rewriting Narratives
Beyond its artistic breadth, Too Deadly challenges how institutions like AGSA engage with Indigenous art. “Galleries are colonial spaces that don’t often present a way in for us,” Cumpston observed, “so we need to flip it and recontextualize it.” The exhibition invites audiences to see the gallery not as a neutral backdrop but as a site of ongoing negotiation—between cultures, histories, and ways of seeing. Interactive installations, such as The Blak Laundry, further confront visitors with questions of sovereignty, labour, and representation in everyday life.
The title itself, Too Deadly, draws from Aboriginal English, where “deadly” means excellent or powerful—a declaration of pride and resilience. Through this lens, the exhibition embodies a defiant optimism: that storytelling and creativity can coexist with memory and mourning. As Cumpston summarized in an opening address, “our art is not static—it’s living, breathing, and continuing to shape the future.”
