The Neoteric project and three Adelaide painters

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.

I saw the sun
I sang my song
I danced my dance
I saw my shadow
I saw my soul
I made my mark!

Historically, Aboriginal people across the continent, whether intentional or casual, could identify the presence of another named person from their indexical mark; footprint, handprint, bum print or body print. It was the first art, and marked this site as my land. This idea was behind my performance I saw the Sun, in 2004, under the Story Bridge in Brisbane, in which I stripped down and danced as the rising sun left my mark as a shadow (the ancestral spirit) on the river’s muddy shore. Made into a video, it was included in two exhibitions in Brisbane in 2004 and 2005.

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 The appointment was rescinded only six days later.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.

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.