NATSIAAs 2026

Would it be fair to say that the 43rd annual National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (the Telstra NATSIAAs) are underwhelming? Not that I’m reporting from Darwin. But from a computer loaded with images of the 64 finalists selected from a rather meagre 221 entries. That selection was made by Gail Mabo from the TSI, Dean Greeno from Tassie and Dr Shannon Brett, a Brisbane-based artist and guest curator at the Museum & Art Gallery of the NT. Having also studied the annual Salon des Refuses selection as well, where there are a couple of works that might have challenged for entry into the NATSIAAs – a painting by Patrick Mung Mung and pottery by Ngunytjima Carroll – I can’t really blame the pre-selectors.

But I’m pretty unimpressed by the efforts of the final judges, Yhonnie Scarce, Julie Gough and Warraba Weatherall, all prominent urban artists. For they’ve taken what might be called the Richard Bell option – if in doubt, chose a well-made piece of Western art that will hit the headlines, just as Ryan Presley’s “Renaissance masterpiece” (as hailed by Dr Brett) has successfully done. Way back, Bell’s Theorem‘s borrowings from Roy Lichtenstein was chosen by the Irish NGA Director Brian Kennedy, and more recently, Harold Thomas caught the eye with a colourful massacre oil painting.

Dr Presley, Griffith University-trained and Brisbane-based but having ancestry from the Marringarr people of the distant Bonaparte Gulf, offers a sleeping Indigenous boy in a work entitled Our Lifestyle of Tranquility Undisturbed. But he then disturbs the image with a gun, water below the boy’s bed, and bushfire in the distance through a window. References are to the contraposto paintings of Siennese Renaissance artist Domenico Beccafumi – especially a famously Mannerist Annunciation of the Virgin. But there’s also tribute to the chiarascuro lighting of the better-known Caravaggio. An undoubtedly fine piece of research by an artist who is Aboriginal. But is he an ‘Aboriginal artist’ – a description denied by Richard Bell when he won the ‘Big Telstra’ $100,000 prize?

Significantly, below the ‘masterpiece’ headlines for Presley, the reporting invariably goes straight on to hail Jenna Mayliema Lee’s win for Works on Paper. Now this has never been a category that got much coverage in the past. But throw in a ‘good story’, and you have inexperienced journos jumping. In this case, the Melburnian Lee has proudly admitted to stealing guidemaps from the British Museum (which asks two pounds for the papers) and turning them into dillybags. “I ended up with this network of people who were pinching maps from the British Museum on my behalf,” Jenna Lee justified, “which is not dissimilar to the way that Empire sent people out to collect world culture. The act of taking it was the work. This is not theft for theft’s sake, but conceptual restitution, an act that asks: what does it mean to take from an institution built on taking?”.

If only fellow finalists Ian Rictor, Iluwanti Ken, Carol Puntatameri, Michelle Anderson and Anniebell Marrngamarrnga, offering more traditional artworks, had had such good stories for the press!

And I wonder whether Vanessa Inkamala would have won the General Painting prize if she hadn’t added text to her classic Hermannsberg watercolour landscapes. For the words “Arrkurla Nukala” and “Lyaarta Ntema” mean “before” and “after/today” in her Western Aranda language and developed from a project by urban artist Tony Albert to politicise the Aranda. Mind you, in Inkamala’s own words, it seems they mainly to refer to the mobile phone that allows her to photograph scenes and take them back to the Iltja Ntjarra studio in Alice to create what the Judges called “a compellingly multi-layered journey across time and Country”.

Thanks heavens for the Yolŋu! As ever they are hard to deny prizes, with Barayuwa Munuŋgurr winning the Bark Award and Napuwarri Marawili taking out the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award (sponsored by Telstra).

But even here, there are hidden depths. While Munuŋgurr’s work is based on an entirely traditional story in which ancestors of Barayuwa’s mother’s Munyuku clan killed their brother, the whale Mirinyuŋu, and butchered it, the judges noted that “Barayuwa’s powerful piece deftly both conceals and reveals the cultural narrative at its centre through applied oxide designs co-existing with deliberate excision and removal of other elements. The underpinning story itself is about retaining knowledge of clan origin and identity that includes components deliberately disposed in the deep past. Enacting remembrance is brilliantly evident and executed by the creative decisions made in constructing this compelling work on bark”.

And in Marawili’s ‘Djambatj – Deadly hunter’ sculptures of the Reef Heron totems of the Maḏarrpa clan, the judges couldn’t help but notice the remarkable affinity created by the artist with the fish-spearing techniques of human hunters. “Yolŋu hunters mirror the strategy of this bird, which is also enshrined in the dance”, recognising the essential importance of ceremony as the roots of so much art.

Coincidentally, Darwin’s Outstation Gallery is showing the work of Napuwarri’s father, the late Bakulaŋay Marawili – a major influence on his prize-winning son and a pioneer of engraving his art on to metal. The Outstation group is also showing Milinmgimbi work and Desert artists Denise Brady, the Nangala Robertson sisters, Julie and Sabrina, and the finely stippled works of another pair of sisters, Nancy and Rene Long Nungarrayi.

But back to the NATSIAAs and, almost inevitably, Yolŋu Country, the 30 year old Guruwuy Murrinyina was hailed with the Telstra Emerging Artist Award. Her larrikitj ‘Prismatic arc’ painted with Galpu clan miny’tji represents rainbows and the power of the lightning within them. It also refers to the cyclones created by Wititj, the Rainbow Serpent. The diagonal lines represent trees that have been knocked down as Wititj moves from place to place, as well as the creature’s ribs. “The sun shining against the scales of the snake form a prism of light like a rainbow. The lightning comes when they strike their tongue. The thunder is the sound they make as they move along the ground”. Such might below such a peaceful surface of water-lilies.

Now, is that sort of complexity a match for Dr Presley’s European depths?

Finally, another community has managed to wrest the Multi-Media Award from the Yolŋu. Tiwi man Colin Heenan-Puruntatameri has filmed himself dancing (oddly) The Widow Dance inherited from his mother. He has added the physical forms of Yirriwala and Timirrikimaka, two ironwood objects that traditionally accompany the dance, carved by Patrick Freddy Puruntatameri; and the dance is sung for him by my old mate Pedro Wanaeamirri. A community effort.

I wish you well in experiencing the 2026 Telstra NATSIAAs at a distance, but the only options are an unsatisfying video tour. I’ve never manged to master one of them. Or there’s the diminished imagery offered to let you vote in the People’s Choice Awards.

Though I clearly need to add MAGNT’s own WARNING: “Audiences are advised that some artworks in this exhibition include discussions and depictions of colonial violence and death”.

 

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