I went to the United States when they put up an exhibition of my paintings there. During this time, I traveled around the United States and saw other Yolŋu paintings in museums there. A fire came up into my chest seeing those old paintings. So, I and other Yolŋu went back and forth to the United States, working on this project to curate this exhibition and looking at all the paintings there.
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This article featuring selected paintings by the multimedia artist Khaled Sabsabi was commissioned and drafted well-prior to the furore surrounding his celebrated appointment (with curator Michael Dagostino) to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale. The appointment was rescinded only six days later. As an art historian undertaking the unruly task of writing about contemporary art as a type of future history, I feel compelled to contextualise my original article, which I proposed as a reflection on Sabsabi’s more contemplative material practice.
The last essay I contributed to Artlink examined recent curatorial efforts to insert Philippa Cullen (1950–1975) into the canon of Australian feminist performance art history. The revisionist energies amplifying the contributions of an emerging experimental artist of the early seventies, were institutionally performed via the National Gallery of Australia’s (NGA) Know My Name project. As important as the project has been in critically redressing gender imbalance and historical gaps in the NGA’s collection, it stirred great debate and highlighted the multitude of important female-identifying and non-binary artists, living and dead, who fail to cut through.
In August 2024 I joined Wollongong Art Gallery as its seventh director in its almost 50-year history. Immediately immersed in its large collection as a crash course in its cultural and sociopolitical contribution to Australian (largely regional) art history, I kept returning to the enigmatic work of a local and long-forgotten painter Joan Meats (1920–2003).
A lover whilst exiting my life, turned to say “l never really loved you. l loved your art.” It wasn’t the biggest burn. I consider myself the art anyway. It’s the best part of me. Really, actually, the only me. There is so little of me (‘my’ life). I have extra territory to make a variety of art personas.
- Diena Georgetti, in conversation with Melissa Loughlan 2025
Diena Georgetti’s recent paintings eschew anecdotal narrative, but nevertheless conjure a labyrinthine backstory that interweaves a complex stratum of influence, personal necessity and artistic identity. It would be more than glancingly accurate to see these works both as insights into the dichotomy between creative impulse and control, and as vehicles to some place of release or repose.
April 2025 marks twenty-five years since Rusty Peters (Dirrji) and Peter Adsett painted Two Laws One Big Spirit at Humpty Doo near Darwin. The fourteen canvases—seven pairs, in formal association with each other—are now permanently housed in the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), gifted by GRANTPIRRIE.
A quarter of a century is a long time in the politics of reconciliation, the framework within which the series has mostly been discussed. ‘A dialogue in paint’ as Adsett refers to the career-defining project, the works are evidence of a correspondence between unlikely painting peers, born of acutely different world views and visual vocabularies.
