Currently logged in. Logout
The Darwin Festival is the Top End’s annual winter festival celebrating art, culture, and community with outdoor festivities and an expansive program comprising over eighty events, including 280 performances spread across twenty-eight venues and featuring more than 850 artists, from 10 to 27 August 2023.
Timothy Cook working in the Jilamara studios, 2023. Photograph: Will Heathcote. Courtesy the artist and Jilamara Arts and Crafts Association, Northern Territory
Visual art highlights include the 2023 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, showcasing an impressive breadth of works by sixty-three finalists on view at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Kurrujupuni (Ochre Colours) brings together works by Tiwi Island artists from Jilamara Arts and Crafts Association and Munupi Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Association, based on jilamara (body painting design), clan totems, and Tiwi creation stories using local natural ochres. Blak Power is a survey exhibition at Northern Centre for Contemporary Art honouring First Nations superheroes in Indigenous Australian contemporary art through diverse mediums, exploring popular Blak culture’s identity and supernatural elements. Gumurr’manydji Manapanmirr Djäma is a photographic exhibition celebrating Yolŋu culture, self-determination, and ingenuity, curated by an all-Indigenous team, complemented with insightful talks from community members. And Remix showcases the creativity of a new generation of CDU Visual Arts students through a vibrant collection of fluorescent Risographic posters, with interactive workshops for beginners to contribute to the installation.
Finally, the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair returns from 8 to 13 August in an explosion of Indigenous culture, art, couture, and creativity from over 1,500 artists and designers, offering a unique opportunity to purchase directly from more than seventy Indigenous-owned art centres as well as participate in cultural workshops, industry discussions, and material demonstrations, including this year’s new outdoor experience, the DAAF Meeting Place.
