Cover image: Alana Hunt, A Deceptively Simple Need 2025, installation view, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA). Photo: Rebecca Mansell.

Alana Hunt’s latest exhibition, A Deceptively Simple Need, now on display at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) excels in many ways. The exhibition convincingly frames a variety of everyday societal mechanisms as quiet violence towards the traditional custodians of the lands we inhabit. There is only one element missing that would complete the exhibition’s scope: a way to facilitate conversations with Indigenous voices.

A Deceptively Simple Need is a solo exhibition from Gadigal, Sydney based artist Alana Hunt and is the fourth exhibition in an annual $80,000 commission funded by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, which has been delivered in partnership with PICA. Hunt is a non-indigenous artist who was originally based in Miriwoong Country in Kununurra where she lived for over a decade. Her previous film Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023) as a precursor to A Deceptively Simple Need used similar forensic visual language to study non-Indigenous life in Kununurra, and the wider implications of the need for housing on land that is not your own.

Hunt has an impressive and impactful command of visual languages and through these languages conducts a dissection of ways quotidian colonial systems are a continual violation of unceded Indigenous lands. The central object she uses in this analysis is the ‘Australian Dream’ of home ownership. By juxtaposing media that glorifies this dream with a harsh reality of its cost, Hunt peels back the veneer to expose the dream as silent exploitation.

The central exhibition space is an overwhelming spectacle of sound, movement and colour. The largest projected work Displacement and Replacement (2025) intercuts state sponsored films of white industries from the 1960’s and 1970’s against phrases taken from these films that expose their colonial subtext.

The titular work within the exhibition, the deceptively simple need for a home (on other people’s land) is a video of 14 vignettes originally captured on Super 8mm film. In the work, Hunt details a lived experienced in rental accommodation, 14 homes lived in by a single child until they left school. Through these vignettes of the houses a historical timeline is created, in which a coming-of-age narrative is interwoven and inextricable from the localities and histories of First Nations People.

The purpose of this exhibition is to expose and understand the industrial methods of erasure of Indigenous people from their own lands, and to this end Hunt succeeds, but without Indigenous perspectives. This exhibition, via collaboration with and indigenous artists, insights, voices and stories could complete the conversation as to how you instigate and support change once these exploitative systems have been identified.

Through her body of work in A Deceptively Simple Need Hunt makes a cutting and eloquent analysis of colonial complacency in systems we take for granted. Her command and combination of different kinds of media make a compelling argument about the costs of Indigenous communities from capitalist need. However, the exhibition could benefit from an extended conversation, potentially visually with Indigenous creatives. Put simply, A Deceptively Simple Need is a strong exhibition that could benefit from further perspectives.

Exhibition on now until 21 December. Find out more at pica.org.au