Our Em is going to London. It’s belated recognition of her pre-eminence in both Australian and First Nations art, as she was pioneering in being recognised for her individual brilliance at telling her community’s stories. Until she came along in 1989, it was assumed by the non-Indigenous marketplace that community stories had to be presented only as the shared responsibility of a community.

Now, in an old power station beside the Thames, Emily Kame Kngwarreye is being shown (and bought) for the visual beauty of her work, not for the meanings they had for her and her fellow Anmatyerre. There are descriptions of her singing her works when visiting an exhibition in Canberra. As each section of multiply dotted works is touched, a different verse accompanies it, with fellow artist Gloria Petyarre responding instinctively. That was the meaning. Sadly today, the women of Utopia who were closely involved in the development of the precursor exhibition to the Tate’s at the National Gallery in 2024, couldn’t join in with Emily’s songs as they listened to recordings.

Not that London is getting all of that NGA show. About a third of it will be fresh and new, for it seems that private lenders of works set such a store on being associated with major exhibitions like this that they have to pay for the privilege of being selected. As a result, many Australian owned works seen in Canberra won’t be in London. I note that Helen Eager and Christopher Hodges (the man who gave Emily her first solo show) have stuck to their last. In the missing works’ place, the Tate itself, the Albertina in Vienna, the Kyveli and George Economou Collection, the Thomas Vroom Collection, Lady Sarah Atcherley (in honour of her son, the Aussie art collector and philanthropist, Simon Mordant) and, above all, Swiss-based collector, Bérengère Primat, who has no fewer than eight pieces in the show. She has the good fortune to be the eldest of eight children in one of France’s wealthiest families (her father was billionaire Didier Primat, director of oilfield services company Schlumberger), and has established the Fondation Opale, a private museum in Lens, Switzerland, in part dedicated, she says, to the “recognition of contemporary Aboriginal art as an important movement in its own right in the contemporary art world”.

And the Tate exhibition moves on to Lens in 2026.

“I discovered Aboriginal art before even going to Australia”, Primat told the Financial Times. “I saw a show in a small gallery in Paris’s Marais district in 2002. Even now, I can’t really explain what happened, but it was an overwhelming experience. It inhabited me and has become stronger as the years pass. I bought two works as well as the catalogue and subsequently met the curator, Arnaud Serval, who took me to Australia for the first time. Now I visit every year. I couldn’t live without my collection and I couldn’t possibly pick out just one piece. Each has a kind of presence and rhythm, and together they form a chorus”.

Hopefully, that’s precisely what visitors to the Tate will be singing as they leave an exhibition called Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern between next Friday and January 2026. But note the misspellings in that title. I attempted to deal with that when it began in Canberra. Oddly, the NGA decided that Kngwarreye would no longer have her preference for the way her name was spelt in English – a language she barely spoke. And Kame became Kam. Similarly, Kngwarreye’s clan, the Anmatyerre, which is pronounced Unmadgera, lost the ‘e’ at the end, although it is sounded. It’s just weird. Enough said.

Now I’ll note that, on the strength of the UK catalogue, I believe an improved show has resulted from the changed art selection. The early batiks are still interesting, early body painting works portraying those generous Anmatyerre breasts are in abundance, a 1990 Mourning Story from the Fondation Opale is already innovative, and there is a generous selection of that early over-dotting period when Kngwarreye’s individuality was really established, sustaining itself across a 3mtr canvas as early as 1991. In fact, it takes until page 91 in the catalogue (having started at 27) to reach the Colourist period in 1992, which I’ve always felt was step backwards from Emily’s magnificent sensitivity of tone, though the NGA has proudly sent its 22-panel ‘Alhalkere Suite’ from that era.

Images continue for a further 32 pages through body stripes and grasses to the predominantly black and white Yam/Kame works, suggesting a proper emphasis on the earlier parts of Kngwarreye’s seven year career. But the 8 metre ‘Big Yam’ has not travelled. And once again the curators have rejected every one of the miraculous 24-canvas ‘Last Paintings’ series which were such a hit in Japan.

The exhibition was originally curated at the NGA by Kelli Cole of the Warumungu and Luritja peoples and Hetti Perkins, an Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman, and they’ve now been joined by Yorta Yorta woman Kimberley Moulton as Adjunct Curator Indigenous Art at Tate Modern. Hard to know what Moulton will have added to the mix, especially as she has two roles in Australia as well, but her catalogue essay adds some challenge:

“Revisitation is an important learning event. When you go back to a past story it is unchanged, but you are different, so you get a new view of what the story means because of who you have become. The redirection that comes from living awareness of the whole of life is key to decolonisation. The intelligence of Country reveals itself to us if we listen well, observe these connections closely, speak softly, and be ourselves.

“Before British colonisation, art and storytelling across the continent were drawn in sand, etched into bark and wood, carved on rock and painted on the body – and it is pivotal to note that these practices continue today. This is not primitive art; it is practice informed by Country that communicates important knowledge across generations, through a visual language that is not only creative but has been adapted over centuries. It is figurative, patterned, literal, conceptual, abstract and complex and should be read in the context of a living, breathing and shifting continuum. Indigenous art did not begin in the 1970s when the Western art market established an appetite for it, but has a long history – one that adapts to change and sits both within the history of modern movements and outside them”.

Does the word ‘everywhen’ spring to mind? For this word is steadily replacing the Dreamtime that Western writers have latched on to and lead many to associate sleep with Aboriginal timelessness. But it is undoubted that Emily Kngwarreye was transmitting concepts on canvas that existed in her and her ancestors’ minds well before 1971 when Papunya painters may have embraced ‘art’, even if any market for their work at that time was but a nibble. And Moulton is right to take a new more English viewpoint that Emily is now out in the world “to be read (as making) art that’s beyond any colonial ethnographic construct”.

At first I questioned the need for these post-Colonial references. Did Emily care a hoot about urban politics? But then I discovered from the new film biography mentioned below that she actually attended 1988 Survival Day events in Sydney.

So, is the Tate show recognition of the death of that colonial ethnographic construct outside Australia, or is the fact that London will also see three commercial shows featuring Kngwarreye a more significant factor?

“In anticipation of Kngwarreye’s upcoming retrospective at Tate Modern, Tjukurrpa: The Dreaming arrives in London (via SmithDavidson Gallery) at the Unit Gallery in Hanover Square as a (not quite) unique opportunity to take a wider look at the sublime power of one of the world’s oldest continuous painting traditions. It features 11 iconic works from Kngwarreye herself, as well as her contemporaries and others including prominent figures from the East Kimberly Art Movement and the Western Desert Movement”.

Just round the corner, “My Country” at Pace London is a solo exhibition dedicated to Kngwarreye, organised in collaboration with Australia’s D’Lan Contemporary and running through August in conjunction with the Tate survey. On offer, for instance, is Desert Storm (1992), where she had streamlined her technique, replacing intricate dotting and layered compositions with broader strokes and expansive fields of colour – in other words, saving effort! Despite this, asking prices range of US$1m. to $1.5m placing the work in line with the artist’s auction record of US$1.3m (AUD $2.1m) for Earth’s Creation I (1994), which was sold in 2017.

Meanwhile, JGM Gallery has a show called We call it Urapuntja of six current artists from the same Urapuntja (Utopia) community, described as “kinship” relatives. That’s a system of connection that means they often carry the same “skin name”, assigned based on community affiliation, in this case Kngwarreye. Among the exhibiting artists are Alyawarre painter, Audrey Kngwarreye Morton, Anmatyerre painter, Josie Petyarr Kunoth, and Emily’s brother by kinship, Kudditji Kngwarreye.

And if you can’t be in London at this splendid time, you could catch some of the JGM artists such as Josie Petyarr Kunoth at Sydney’s Delmar Gallery in Ashfield, which is celebrating a range of the lesser-known art from the Barkly Region. Failing that, Do Not Miss the documentary film, ‘Emily : I Am Kam’ when it shows on NITV on 9th July and later on SBS and its OnDemand.