Tjukurrpa: The Dreaming
9th July, 2025 –17th August, 2025
Unit
3 Hanover Square
London
United Kingdom
Unit’s new exhibition, “Tjukurrpa: The Dreaming,” showcases nine leading Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, led by the celebrated Emily Kam Kngwarray.
A new exhibition opened on 9 July at London’s Unit, bringing some of the most significant names in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art to a British audience, and tracing the profound influence of Emily Kam Kngwarray, the Anmatyerr painter whose work has earned her a place among the 20th century’s most celebrated artists.
©2025 Unit
Tjukurrpa: The Dreaming gathers work from nine artists whose paintings emerge from one of the world’s oldest continuous traditions. The show arrives ahead of Tate Modern’s forthcoming Kngwarray retrospective, offering what organisers call a rare opportunity to view her paintings in conversation with those of her peers, predecessors and artists shaped by her legacy.
Alongside Kngwarray, the exhibition features figures central to the East Kimberley Art Movement and the Western Desert Movement, including Rover Thomas Joolama, Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrla, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Makinti Napanangka, Tommy Watson and Patrick Olodoodi Tjungurrayi.
For many Indigenous Australian and First Nations communities, Tjukurrpa — often translated as “The Dreaming” — is not a distant past but an ongoing reality, in which ancestral spirits formed the land, its features and its laws. It is conveyed through painting, storytelling, song and ceremony, and is tied to specific sites for which particular families or groups serve as custodians.
In bringing these works to London, Tjukurrpa: The Dreaming situates them not only as individual achievements but as part of a continuum — one that connects the contemporary art world to traditions that have endured for tens of thousands of years.
Tjukurrpa: The Dreaming opens on the 9th of July, 2025 until the 17th of August, 2025 at Unit
©2025 Unit
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