Bundanon’s Season 2 program pairs Pumani’s intergenerational reflections on Antara with Sequeira’s meditative explorations of colour, geometry and sound.
Betty Kuntiwa Pumani with her major work Antara commissioned for malatja-malatja at Bundanon, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mimili Maku Arts.
Bundanon has launched its Season 2 exhibition program with two major solo presentations from acclaimed Australian artists Betty Kuntiwa Pumani and David Sequeira. Running until 5 October 2025, the exhibitions bring together major bodies of work and new commissions that reflect each artist’s distinctive visual language and deep connection to culture, memory and material practice.
In her first major museum survey, Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands artist Betty Kuntiwa Pumani presents ‘maḻatja-maḻatja (those who come after)’, a landmark exhibition curated by Bundanon CEO Rachel Kent in collaboration with the artist and Mimili Maku Arts. Spanning more than a decade of practice, the exhibition features early works from the Mimili Maku Arts Cultural Collection, shown publicly for the first time, alongside significant loans from national institutions and a new three-part painting commission, Antara (2025), created specifically for Bundanon.
Pumani’s paintings shimmer with the colours and textures of her mother’s Country, Antara, in the APY Lands of north-western South Australia. Rich fields of red earth are punctuated by waterholes in bright blue, with stippled white tobacco flowers revealing sacred Tjukurpa (ancestral stories) tied to maku, the Witchetty Grub. These works are deeply rooted in matrilineal knowledge, passed from mother to daughter through generations. The exhibition title – a Pitjantjatjara term meaning ‘those who come after’ – evokes this sense of continuity and future-focused care for Country and culture.
Four works by Pumani’s mother, Kunmanara (Milatjari) Pumani, and sister, Kunmanara (Ngupulya) Pumani, are featured, as is a major collaborative painting made with her daughter, Marina Pumani Brown. This multi-generational presence reinforces the exhibition’s central theme: painting as an act of intergenerational storytelling, as well as a powerful assertion of cultural identity.
Reflecting on the survey, Pumani said:
“Over many years, I have painted many stories. Some are small works. Others are large, carrying the same story across many canvases… To show together with my extended family – my older sister, my mother, my daughter – generations of women painting the stories of our Country… It is a special thing to be able to do. And for this exhibition, I painted one more canvas for the next generation… This is for future generations, for those children to learn from.”
A new monographic publication accompanies the exhibition, featuring essays, interviews in Pitjantjatjara language, full-colour reproductions and detailed documentation of the Bundanon commission. The book is scheduled for release in August 2025.
David Sequeira, The Shape of Music (installation view), Bundanon, 2025. Courtesy of the artist © David Sequeira, 2025. Photo: Zan Wimberley
In the adjoining gallery space, Melbourne-based artist David Sequeira presents ‘The Shape of Music’, a contemplative and immersive exhibition bringing together four bodies of work in diverse media, including print, glass, painting, and sound. Known for his refined explorations of colour, geometry and spiritual abstraction, Sequeira’s work invites quiet reflection and deep looking.
At the heart of his Bundanon presentation is a new commission, Form from the Formless (Under Bundanon Stars) (2025), which brings together 30 music stands, hand-painted manuscript sheets, and a soundscape composed by Elena Kats-Chernin and Hari Sivanesan. The work draws inspiration from the glittering night skies above Bundanon and continues Sequeira’s interest in the relationship between colour and music, as well as form and formlessness.
Other key works in the exhibition include delicate watercolours on music notation paper, unique-state prints made in collaboration with the Australian Print Workshop, and a collection of coloured glass vessels created at Adelaide’s JamFactory. These glass works, presented in chromatic clusters, capture shifting tonalities and suggest time unfolding slowly and fluidly.
A highlight of the exhibition is the inclusion of Sequeira’s A Sacred Conversation (2007), a rarely shown work, placed in dialogue with Arthur Boyd’s St Francis of Assisi series (1964–65) from the Bundanon Collection. This pairing reflects the artist’s interest in cross-cultural spiritual traditions and the mystical undercurrents that inform his practice.
“My influences range from Tantra and Indian miniature painting to Western modernism and medieval mysticism,” Sequeira explained.
“I practice geometry every day. Through the interplay of circles and lines I learn a lot about time… Beyond the distinctions of the past, present and the future, history and life become more malleable through geometry and colour – it’s how I see and understand the world.”
Bundanon CEO Rachel Kent noted:
“These exhibitions offer deeply personal and resonant insights into two distinct yet connected practices. Betty Kuntiwa Pumani’s paintings reflect a visionary relationship to Country and matrilineal knowledge, while David Sequeira’s works invite us to consider the sensory dimensions of colour and form. Both artists have created new work that draws directly from the site and spirit of Bundanon, and in doing so, honour Arthur Boyd’s vision of Bundanon as a working arts centre and a place for ideas, creation and contemplation.”
Together, ‘maḻatja-maḻatja (those who come after)’ and ‘The Shape of Music’ reflect the strength and diversity of contemporary Australian practice, bridging the ancestral and the abstract, the sonic and the visual, the generational and the profoundly personal.
The exhibition is on view until 5 October 2025. For more information, please visit Bundanon.
