From 25 to 28 July, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) celebrates its fifteenth anniversary with a cultural and artistic showcase of Queensland’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, featuring hundreds of First Nations artists, performers, fashion designers, and creatives – hosted by Cairns Convention Centre and multiple venues across the city, and shaped by this year’s curatorial theme, ‘Country Speaking’.
CIAF’s anniversary program includes more than thirty free and ticketed events, from exhibitions and music to dance, fashion, conversations, and an art market, as well as workshops in ghost net weaving, printmaking, digital drawing and more. Highlights include Light the Fire fashion performance and Music in the Tanks headlined by Australian rapper Barkaa, as well as CIAF satellite exhibitions at NorthSite Contemporary Arts Gallery, Cairns Art Gallery, and Cairns Court House Gallery. The CIAF Symposium, a two-day think tank, will present feature speakers and conversation panels discussing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural expressions that span across western-defined disciplines of urban design, cultural practice, performance, art and science from practitioners.

Zane Saunders, Transition, 2018, digital image. Photograph: Greg Hillman-Kuranda Photography. Courtesy the artist and Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Queensland
Not Selling Cakes, CIAF’s signature anniversary exhibition, on view at Tanks Arts Centre from 5 to 28 July, recognises artists who have significantly contributed to CIAF over the years. Responding to the number ‘15’ as a legacy marker, CIAF invited fifteen arts professionals to provide input into the development of the exhibition in celebration of art, culture, and community. Its title, Not Selling Cakes, is a statement by the late Billy Missi, first used to title the landmark 2006 report that investigated issues affecting the sustainability of Indigenous art centres in Far North Queensland and the Torres Strait, a key factor in the launch of CIAF in 2009.