Cover Image: A selection of works from PICA’s Season 1 program, spanning Awakening Histories, Painting Itself, and Soft Grates. Images supplied.

The season’s centrepiece Awakening Histories arrives in Perth as a WA premiere after opening at Monash University Museum of Art in late 2025. Informed by Monash’s ARC Laureate project Global Encounters & First Nations Peoples: 1000 Years of Australian History, the exhibition is effectively a counter-narrative to Eurocentric histories of discovery. It foregrounds the long-standing trade relationships between northern Australia’s First Nations peoples and Makassan seafarers – connections that stretch back centuries before Captain Cook’s arrival – through ocean-centred storytelling, new commissions, UNESCO-listed artworks and an expanded film program.

Presented in collaboration with Perth Festival and shaped by an Australian-Indonesian curatorium, the exhibition features over 30 artists and collectives, including Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Aziziah Diah Aprilya, Cian Dayrit, Guan Wei, Jenna Lee and Darrell Sibosado.

Curator Hannah Mathews describes the show as an exhibition “for people who love stories, who are interested in our history, and who are seeking to look into the past to imagine a better future.” She traces the project’s origins in part to Anthony Albanese’s 2022 visit to Makassar in South Sulawesi as his first official overseas trip as Prime Minister – a gesture that drew public attention to what Mathews calls an incredibly significant but little-known chapter in the continent’s international relations.

For Perth audiences specifically, the curatorium has drawn on significant works held in Western Australian collections, among them several of the Yirrkala Drawings, which are UNESCO-listed and held in the Berndt Collection at UWA, and a major bark work by Johny Bulunbulun from the Holmes à Court Collection.

While the relationship between Makassans and First Nations people has often centred on Yolngu communities in Yirrkala, the exhibition’s Perth iteration draws attention to the breadth of these connections across northern Australia – from the Kimberley coast to the Tiwi Islands and Groote Eylandt.

A major new commission by Darrell Sibosado, a Bard man from Lombadina on the Dampier Peninsula, anchors this Western Australian perspective. Made entirely of pearl and trochus shells, the work speaks to both the livelihood of the sea and early methods of trade. The exhibition also includes a photographic essay by young Makassan artist Aziziah Diah Aprilya, produced through PICA’s BREEZE International Studio Exchange program with Rumata Artspace in Makassar, which traces the migration of the tamarind tree from Makassar all the way to Perth Zoo – a thread that connects neatly to the botanical focus of several other works in the show.

Among the exhibition’s most striking contributions is Larrakia, Wardaman and Karajarri artist Jenna Lee’s recreation of 15 significant tamarind trees in sprouting paper form. The tamarind, Lee explains, is living proof of oceanic exchange that predates European arrival. “For Larrakia people, these trees are not incidental imports,” she says. “They are burial markers, places of gathering, mourning and memory that still stand today.” By transforming a colonial book into living saplings, Lee shifts authority from the archive back to Country itself.

As a Gulumerridjin, Wardaman and Karajarri Saltwater woman with Japanese, Chinese and Filipino ancestry, Lee brings a deeply personal dimension to the exhibition’s oceanic themes. “The ocean does not divide, it connects,” she reflects. Within the framework of water as a connective force, her work becomes a meditation on identity as something fluid and relational, flowing between neighbours rather than fixed by borders or chronology.

If Awakening Histories traces connection through water and botanical evidence, the world-premiere exhibition Painting Itself / 绘画本身 asks what happens when painting is allowed to travel as painting – laterally, across geographies, free of the inherited binaries of East versus West or figuration versus abstraction. Guest curated by Jonathan Nichols, the show brings together 13 works by five leading artists from across Asia: Jon Chan from Singapore, Un Cheng and Chris Huen Sin-Kan from Hong Kong, Noor Mahnun from Malaysia and Tang Dixin from China. None has been shown in Australia before.

Nichols frames the exhibition around what he calls a “horizontal culture in painting,” one that loosens the old reflex of looking west to America or Europe for validation and instead lets knowledge move laterally, studio to studio, image to image. “I’m not sure ‘power’ is the best term for what I’m describing,” he says, “because the point isn’t to replace one centre with another; it’s to loosen the reflex that value is granted from above.” The word he prefers is vitality – the sense that a painting has presence, speaks back and generates its own internal pressures.

That vitality is palpable across the exhibition’s range. Tang Dixin’s Yellow Peril implicates the viewer through an unsettling gesture, yet its scale and completeness of mark produce something calm and thoughtful rather than performatively aggressive. 

Noor Mahnun’s domestic and figurative paintings resist realism in favour of what Nichols describes as attitude rather than physiognomy – an expression that cannot be fully planned but is gradually coaxed into being as the painting comes into balance. She has spoken of recognising her cousins’ smiles in ancient Khmer temple figures in Paris, a felt recognition across time and place that mirrors the exhibition’s broader logic.

And in Jon Chan’s Hong Lim series, Singapore becomes both subject and structure, where personal ancestry, public space and contemporary events sit together in a single frame without resolution. Nichols describes Chan as a kind of history painter whose works carry a charge of anxiety, memory and complicity, holding tension rather than resolving it.

Nichols is deliberate about refusing the standard chronological container for painting’s history. Works in the exhibition span roughly 15 years, yet painting, he argues, does not age in a simple linear way. “If a painting is vital it stays operative in the present tense,” he says, “continuing to speak rather than becoming a historical document.”

The season’s third opening presentation draws the water theme inward – literally into the PICA building itself. Soft Grates, a three-part installation by Melbourne-based artists Jen Berean and James Carey, is the fourth Judy Wheeler Commission at PICA. The year-long, site-responsive work uncovers the hidden water networks flowing through PICA’s home in Boorloo, comprising a sculptural intervention, a sound work composed from recordings of local water sources, and a copper sculpture indexing the building’s annual water consumption.

Where Awakening Histories follows water across oceans and Painting Itself traces it through the medium’s internal currents, Soft Grates turns attention to the slow, temporal and fragile nature of the water systems we rarely see – the ones running beneath the floorboards of the institution itself. It is a fitting companion to the season’s other presentations: a reminder that the connective force of water operates not only across vast oceanic distances but also in the quiet, unglamorous infrastructure of daily life.

The season’s public program extends these conversations generously. PICA’s opening night on 5 February featured a live set by alt-jazz improvisers jade//vision, while the free Weekends at PICA program on 7 February offered exhibition tours, storytelling sessions with Ron Bradfield Jnr – a Bardi and Jawi saltwater man who has also designed family-friendly activities for the PICA Hub – and artist talks including a panel on water with James Carey, Jenna Lee and Darrell Sibosado. 

Later in the season, PICA unveils its inaugural boorda yeyi Immersive Arts Commission, April Phillips’ Under Waters, and the world premiere of Talya Rubin’s Zoology at WA Museum Boola Bardip, a subverted performance lecture exploring wildness and extinction as part of APAM 2026.

Taken together, PICA’s Season 1 makes a good case for a different kind of cultural geography and chronology. Mathews puts it plainly: “Art allows the past and present to sit together.” For Jenna Lee, the work becomes a way of positioning layered heritage “within a much older rhythm of exchange.”

For full details of PICA’s Season 1 2026 program, see pica.org.au