Walking through the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) alongside Nici Cumpston, it’s as if the Barkandji artist and curator is surrounded by old friends.
For the past 10 years, Cumpston’s role as artistic director of Tarnanthi festival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art – which this week celebrates a decade with a supersized statewide iteration spanning more than 30 exhibitions and events, including a major exhibition at AGSA – has seen her travel widely and listen deeply to bring these canvases, sculptures and video works to Kaurna country.
There’s Nyangumarta, Warnman, and Manjilyjarra artist Nyaparu (William) Gardiner’s portraits of his grandfather and other Aboriginal stockmen of his childhood in the 1940s – many of whom took part in the historic Pilbara strike in 1946, in which more than 800 Indigenous pastoral workers walked off stations to protest exploitative work conditions.
“He was painting all of these incredible people from memory,” Cumpston says of Gardiner, who died in 2018 shortly before many of these paintings were featured in the 2019 festival. “I love the way his works are quite ghostly, and it’s almost like they’re melding in with country.”
My Jamu (Grandfather) Mine, 2018, by Nyaparu (William) Gardiner. Illustration: Nyaparu (William) Gardiner/AGSA
Around the corner is Kuḻaṯa Tjuṯa (Many Spears), a supernova of 550 interlocking spears hand-carved by Aṉangu men, clustered in orbit around a blinding white light. Beneath them, rings of piti – water carriers made by Aṉangu women – are arranged, crater-like, in a hypnotic response to the trauma of British weapons testing carried out on Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara country during the cold war.
These works might reflect on histories of survival and resistance, but when Cumpston took on the job of a then unnamed, once-off festival of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander art more than a decade ago, she was determined to make sure audiences and institutions knew this was not about looking back.
“So many times you have these conversations with people where they talk about the past, and they talk about people and art forms as if all that happened then,” Cumpston says.
“[But] this is about now,” she says. “It’s deeply steeped in tradition, but this is what’s happening now, and it’s so exciting. So let’s keep looking to the future together.”
It’s a mission reflected in the festival’s name, a new word in the language of Adelaide’s Kaurna traditional owners, bestowed upon the festival by Kaurna elder Stephen Gadlabarti Goldsmith. Translation: “To rise, come forth, spring up or appear.”
That ethos is carried throughout Too Deadly: Ten Years of Tarnanthi, the festival’s flagship exhibition of more than 200 artworks, which puts familiar pieces in conversation with new or unseen ones by the same artists, or family members who continue to push their practice forward.
Installation view of the exhibition Too Deadly: Ten Years of Tarnanthi, at Art Gallery of South Australia, October 2025. Photograph: Saul Steed/AGSA
Many of the 9,477 artists who have participated in Tarnanthi and its annual art fair over the past decade have become household names, including Kaylene Whiskey and Vincent Namatjira. Others, such as Pitjantjatjara artist Iluwanti Ken and her peers in Amata and other communities across the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands, have steadily built bold, original bodies of work with the festival’s support.
Cumpston says that Tarnanthi was set up to allow the Art Gallery of South Australia and its infrastructure do the “heavy lifting” to present and promote the work, while empowering artists to “think big”. The gallery has since acquired more than 900 works created for the festival.
“It was, and still is, really important to provide the opportunity, but also to nurture, have those conversations … [and ask artists] what do they want to do? [Rather than], ‘I really like that work, can we show that?’”
Seven Sistas Sign (2021) by Kaylene Whiskey. Photograph: Kaylene Whiskey
The festival has also become a focal point for community and commerce; its opening week can feel like a de facto summit for contemporary First Nations artists, while the art fair has generated $8.5m in sales to the general public.
There’s a palpable buzz among audiences during opening weekend, too. Marri Ngarr artist Ryan Presley, one of this year’s returning artists, recalls the opening night of the 2019 festival: “Usually people start to mill away,” he says of the moment the speeches finished. “But people bum-rushed the gallery – they were here for it.”
Presley was running his performance project Blood Money Exchange in AGSA’s foyer that night: a booth where members of the public could trade their legal tender for custom banknotes illustrated with portraits of First Nations resistance warriors and cultural icons. “People were queueing up,” he recalls of the event, which ended up raising $32,000 for charity in a single weekend.
Blood Money – Infinite Dollar Note – Uncle Stephen Gadlabarti Goldsmith Commemorative Creation, 2019, by Ryan Presley. Illustration: Ryan Presley/Milani Gallery
As successful as Tarnanthi has been, there have been challenges along the way, from the Covid pandemic to the failed voice referendum, which was delivered just days out from the 2023 festival. (“Art is the ground upon which we can always stand united,” artist Robert Fielding said in his emotional, defiant opening address that year, a moment recounted in Too Deadly’s exhibition catalogue.)
“Sometimes, this is the only way that they have a voice, through creating these works,” Cumpston reflects. “People can learn so much.”
This year Tarnanthi has faced a different kind of challenge: Cumpston accepted a job as director of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia, a significant outpost for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art in North America, beginning in May.
Stepping into an assistant curator role to assist Cumpston with this year’s festival was Carly Tarkari Dodd, a Kaurna, Narungga and Ngarrindjeri artist who first attended Tarnanthi as a teen, in 2017.
“I just stumbled into the gallery with my friends,” Dodd says. “I was so blown away, I’d never seen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art being celebrated so much.”
In 2019, her own award-winning textile work, grounded in tradition but avowedly contemporary, featured in Tarnanthi.
Dodd says the festival has been important in helping audiences “open up their minds” when it comes to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, expanding their understanding beyond reductive stereotypes like “dot paintings”. Too Deadly’s expansive palette ranges from video of Reko Rennie reclaiming his grandmother’s Kamilaroi country by doing doughnuts in a gold Rolls-Royce, to the thousands of hand-blown glass yams that make up Kokatha and Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce’s hanging installation Thunder Raining Poison.
Thunder Raining Poison (2015) by Yhonnie Scarce relates to the nuclear bomb tests carried out by the British in the 1950s at Maralinga, South Australia. Photograph: Saul Steed/AGSA
For Cumpston, stories like Dodd’s – from teen audience member to participating artist and now curator – are another sign of Tarnanthi’s forward-looking promise.
“In life, generations change, and people come to the fore, and it’s great to actually recognise that this is ever-evolving, culture is ever-evolving,” Cumpston reflects, as we pause before more works: Marrnyula Munuŋgurr’s portrayal of dhawurr fish traps, using earth pigments on stringybark, alongside two pieces by her mother, N Marawili, who passed in 2023.
“And family members, they’re as important as the people [who came] before them, and they’re even stronger because of the people before them. So I’m thrilled that we’re able to do that work.”
Downstairs, the last work audiences see is among the most poignant: Presley’s 2019 watercolour portrait of the late Uncle Stephen Gadlabarti Goldsmith, immortalised on an oversized banknote as part of the Blood Money series, an infinity symbol in place of its denomination. Another old friend, beckoning forwards.
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The 2025 Tarnanthi festival runs until 18 January at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, and across two dozen partner venues statewide
