Bringing together ten artists from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia and Mexico who reach into the chaos of global precarity to create new systems of order across a wide range of media, TarraWarra Museum of Art presents System Release, as part of the TarraWarra International series.
Curated by Dr Emily Cormack, System Release proposes a different understanding of order as a kind of friendship with chaos, presenting personal and collective strategies for making sense of a rapidly changing world.
“We look to artists to expose, explore and interpret precarious global conditions, offering us new perspectives and new ways of being in the world,” says Dr Emily Cormack. “As international systems of law and governance become increasingly contested, this exhibition forecasts creative approaches that move beyond the tenuous, imperfect pacts that have held the last century in place.”
“As these systems collapse, they also release, creating space for new organising principles, where humans might develop with technology, where Indigenous knowledge is more central, and where the interconnectedness between humans and nature is reaffirmed,” said Cormack.
Responding to recent global events that have exposed the vulnerability of civic order, the exhibition challenges the assumption that a so‑called “rules-based order” is what holds society together. It frames collapse as a release, inviting audiences to consider alternative systems of knowledge and ways of being grounded in First Nations thinking, posthumanism, collective intelligence, and more-than-human worldviews.
Indigenous artist Daniel Boyd (Kudjala, Ghungalu, Wangerriburra, Wakka Wakka, Gubbi Gubbi, Kuku Yalanji, Yuggera and Bundjalung) revisits his commission for the TarraWarra Biennial 2014: Whisper in My Mask, in which vinyl stenopeic lenses are applied to the Museum’s north window. These lenses interrupt the view beyond to symbolically disrupt the power of representation and perception.
Francis Carmody (Naarm/Melbourne, Australia) explores appetite as the force that drives progress, collapsing the cycles of natural food chains with industrial supply chains, while Megan Cope (Quandamooka, south-east Queensland, Australia), employs oyster shells in her sculptural installations to refer to the middens of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island).
Mexican artist José Dávila new sculptural assemblage, Esfuerzo Común (2022) combines a range of materials with gravity and chance to evoke the precarious balance between humans and the natural world, while Alicia Frankovich’s (Aotearoa/New Zealand and Naarm/Melbourne, Australia) new sculptural work draws on creatures found in the deep sea and technologies of outer space, connecting biological and cosmic systems.
Originally presented at the 59th Venice Biennale, Marco Fusinato (Naarm/Melbourne) presents large‑scale screenprints from his DESASTRES project, that examines mining, neoliberalism and the forces of greed and consumption through images that signal the breakdown of civil, social and celestial systems.
Globally renowned artist Nikau Hindin (Te Rarawa/Ngāpuhi) presents a series of manu aute (bark cloth kites). These kite-like forms reference an Indigenous technology used by Māori for centuries for divination, communication and oceanic navigation.
Nicholas Mangan’s (Naarm/Melbourne, Australia) work delves into zircon, a 4.4-billion-year-old mineral found in some of the Earth’s earliest crust in Western Australia, using film, photography and sculpture to explore the mineral’s crushed dust.
Dane Mitchell (Aotearoa/New Zealand and Naarm/Melbourne, Australia) presents a work involving homeopathic formulas – one to aid memory and one to erase it – sprayed onto the Museum’s windows, offering the potential to remedy the body, the mind and the Museum itself as a comment on the modernist art museum as an institutional force.
Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tūwharetoa), a Walter’s Prize-winning artist, presents a three-screen video work that embodies the tīwakawaka (a small fantail-like bird) and its role within Māori mythology. The tīwakawaka can transcend the divisions between worlds and species, and even the divide between film and life.
Working across sculpture, installation, moving image and assemblage, each artist brings forward ideas and objects that illuminate the shifting interplay between order and chaos underpinning civic society.
Established in 2013, the TarraWarra International series supports Australian artists to present their work within a global context by exhibiting alongside leading contemporary practitioners from abroad. The initiative situates their practices within international conversations and expands opportunities for critical engagement with contemporary art.
Each edition of TarraWarra International has explored key developments in contemporary practice, from relationships between the animate and inanimate to shifting experiences of temporality and speculative responses to the archive, including Animate/Inanimate (2013), Pierre Huyghe (2015), All that is solid… (2017) and The Tangible Trace (2019).
A fully illustrated publication will accompany the exhibition with a foreword by TarraWarra Museum of Art Director Dr Victoria Lynn and essays by Dr Emily Cormack, Dr Lana Lopesi, and Stan Grant.
TarraWarra International 2026: System Release
TarraWarra Museum of Art, 313 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road, Healesville
Exhibition continues to 5 July 2026
Entry fees apply
For more information, visit: www.twma.com.au for details.
Images: Francis Carmody, Canine Trap III, 2026. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, TarraWarra International 2026: System Release – photo by Andrew Curtis | Daniel Boyd, Untitled, 2014. TarraWarra Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2018. Installation view, TarraWarra International 2026: System Release – photo by Andrew Curtis | Megan Cope (Quandamooka), A great depression, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Installation view, TarraWarra International 2026: System Release – photo by Andrew Curtis | Nicholas Mangan, Matter over Mined, 2012, and Matter over Mined (for A World undone), 2012. Works courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. Installation view, TarraWarra International 2026: System Release – photo by Andrew Curtis