How can contemporary art advance truth-telling? What’s the role of the archive in reframing the narrative?
This year’s Wurrdha Marra Annual Conversation centres First Nations’ self-determination to highlight contemporary art’s capacity to reclaim the archive and with it, generate agency and action.
Hear from Yorta Yorta / Wamba Wamba / Mutti Mutti / Boonwurrung artist Dr Maree Clarke, Waanyi artist Judy Watson, and Pitta Pitta artist Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis who will be in conversation with Professor Lisa Slade, the Hugh Ramsay Chair in Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne.
The Wurrdha Marra Conversation is an annual series that elevates First Nations voices and truth telling. The series celebrates First Nations Australian contemporary art and artists as leading and shaping today’s critical conversations and driving contemporary discourse.
Professor Lisa Slade is the Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. As both a curator and art historian, Lisa has played an active role and has a critical interest in how exhibition making and collection development makes Australia’s art histories. Between 2015 and 2024 she was Assistant Director, Artistic Programs at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) where Lisa led the gallery’s creative output including exhibitions, collection displays, public and educational programs. Together with the AGSA team, she implemented the curatorial signature at AGSA that brings discrete and pervading art histories into dialogue with contemporary art and ideas, including the vital leadership of First Nations’ voices.
Dr Maree Clarke is a Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung woman who grew up in northwest Victoria, mainly in Mildura, on the banks of the Murray River. Maree has been a practicing artist living and working in Melbourne for the last three decades. Clarke is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of south-east Australian Aboriginal art practices, reviving elements of Aboriginal culture that were lost—or laying dormant—over the period of colonisation, as well as a leader in nurturing and promoting the diversity of contemporary south-east Aboriginal artists. Maree is known for her open and collaborative approach to cultural practice. She consistently works in intergenerational collaboration to revive dormant cultural knowledge and uses technology to bring new audiences to contemporary south-east Aboriginal arts.
Judy Watson was born in Mundubbera, Queensland in 1959, and is a descendant of the Waanyi people of north-west Queensland. Her ancestry and personal experiences have been central to her artistic practice, which spans a variety of media, including painting, printmaking, video, sculpture and installation. As an Indigenous woman, Watson focuses on resistance, resilience and survival in response to colonisation. Evoking place and associated memories, the imagery Watson garners may include the historical or scientific document. Her work exposes concealed histories and is a powerful means of truth-telling.
Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis is a proud Pitta Pitta woman, artist and researcher. Her work challenges colonial image-making practices and interrogates the biases embedded within different imaging technologies. Spanning photography, moving image and spoken word, her practice is informed by family stories, oral histories and archival research. Romanis recently completed a PhD at Monash University through the Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture. In 2025, she was a finalist in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, held on Larrakia Country in Darwin.
This program is part of Resonance: Truth Telling at NGV. Generously supported by the Ullmer Family Foundation.