Bundanon has announced its 2025 Season 2 exhibition program celebrating the work of two leading Australian artists, Betty Kuntiwa Pumani and David Sequeira:
● Betty Kuntiwa Pumani: maḻatja-maḻatja (those who come after)
● David Sequeira: The Shape of Music
Running from 28 June – 5 October 2025, both exhibitions encompass significant bodies of work made over a number of years alongside new commissions, offering different perspectives on contemporary practice.
In her first major museum survey, renowned Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands artist Betty Kuntiwa Pumani will present a survey of 11 works spanning 2012 to the present day. Titled maḻatja-maḻatja (those who come after) and curated by Bundanon CEO Rachel Kent in collaboration with the artist and Mimili Maku Arts, the exhibition will encompass a major new three-part painting, ‘Antara’ (2025), created especially for Bundanon. This new commission will be presented alongside major loans from public and private collections including National Gallery of Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Bendigo Art Gallery, contextualised by early works drawn from the Mimili Maku Arts Cultural Collection, shown publicly for the first time.
Betty Kuntiwa Pumani’s paintings reveal a shimmering landscape of red earth, bright blue waterholes and stippled white tobacco flowers. They represent Antara, her mother’s Country in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in north-western South Australia, and Tjukurpa storylines centred on maku, the witchetty grub.
Matrilineal connections inform Pumani’s painting practice, with stories passed down through generations in the depiction of Antara. Reflecting this lineage, four works within the exhibition by the artist’s mother, Kunmanara (Milatjari) Pumani and sister, Kunmanara (Ngupulya) Pumani, highlight the importance of family connection and intergenerational storytelling.
Continuing this legacy, a major collaborative work, ‘Antara’ (2020), by the artist and her daughter, Marina Pumani Brown, is also featured. Through their distinctive approaches to colour, a shared language is revealed in the work which represents one of several collaborations by mother and daughter over a two-year period. These strong matrilineal threads resonate with the exhibition’s title – a Pitjantjatjara term meaning ‘those who come after’ – carrying the understanding that what we do now already belongs to future generations, connecting ancestral past with the future, through ongoing care for Country and culture.
Betty Kuntiwa Pumani said: “We were taught by my mother. My daughters and I paint our Dreaming to teach our younger generation, so that when they are older, they can know everything. When we are old, they will hold onto that knowledge and keep it strong in their paintings, in our family”.
Pumani’s Bundanon survey is expanded by a new monographic publication with interpretative essays, interviews in Pitjantjatjara language by the artist, colour reproductions of exhibited works and detailed documentation of her new commission.
Leading Melbourne-based artist David Sequeira’s solo exhibition, The Shape of Music, brings together four bodies of work in diverse media, including a major new commission for Bundanon. Sequeira’s creative practice reflects a longstanding interest in colour, geometry and sound. Ideas of presence, endlessness and contemplation inform his delicate watercolours on music manuscript sheets – their overlain geometric forms creating chords of intense colour.
His new commission, ‘Form from the Formless (Under Bundanon Stars)’ (2025), comprises 30 music stands, each bearing manuscript sheets with hand-painted imagery of the glittering Bundanon night sky, alongside his signature geometric forms, and a soundscape. This work heightens Sequeira’s profound understanding of the connections between form and sound, shape and music.
Two earlier works highlight Sequeira’s exploration of colour intensity and tonal variation in print-media and glass, working with the Australia Print Workshop, Melbourne and the Glass Studio Jam Factory, Adelaide. Sequeira’s unique-state prints consider the vitality of colour, advancing and receding before the viewer’s eye. His vast accumulations of transparent glass vessels present colour and form as constantly changing yet connected, suggestive of the slow unfolding of time.
Expanding Sequeira’s exhibition is the rarely shown work ‘A Sacred Conversation’ (2007), which refers to the Italian mystic and poet, Saint Francis of Assisi. This work is shown in dialogue with eight lithographic prints from Arthur Boyd’s renowned suite ‘St Francis of Assisi’ (1964-65) and a related painting, selected by Sequeira from the Bundanon Art Collection.
David Sequeira said: “I am influenced by Tantra painting and miniature painting from India, Western modernism and the writings and paintings of 12th and 13th century mystics. 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”.
Rachel Kent, CEO, Bundanon said: “Betty Kuntiwa Pumani is a visionary artistic and cultural leader, her paintings are inextricably linked to her mother’s Country, Antara, on Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. It was a great honour to work with Betty on her major commission for ‘The National’ – her largest and most ambitious work, spanning ten meters in length – in 2020; and now, five years later, to bring her art to Bundanon for her first major museum survey. Betty has created a new triptych for Bundanon, its stippled white colouration capturing the tonal shift in her recent practice and the maku storyline which informs her wider practice. Works by her mother, sister and daughter reflect the enduring power of women’s practice and intergenerational knowledge-sharing through the exhibition.
David Sequeira has spent three decades exploring the visual language of geometry and colour through his art. Utilising music manuscript sheets and sound, his new Bundanon commission is a first, bringing musicality and the direct interplay of sound and image to the fore; and drawing direct inspiration from Bundanon, its natural environment and night sky. Through their embrace of diverse artforms and newly commissioned work, these significant exhibitions reflect Arthur Boyd’s vision for Bundanon as a ‘working arts centre’ and place for ideas, contemplation and connection in the present. We are thrilled to present these two solo exhibitions for Bundanon’s Season 2 program”.
IMAGES AVAILABLE HERE
More information available here.
SEASON 2 STAY WEEKENDS INCLUDE:
● STAY | 19 – 20 JULY 2025
● WILD | 26 – 27 JULY 2025
● RIVERSCAPE | 16 – 17 AUGUST 2025
● ARCHITECTURE | 6 – 7 SEPTEMBER 2025
Ends
Media Contacts
To request interviews, further information or imagery please contact Articulate:
Siân Davies sian@articulatepr.com.au 0402 728 46
Sasha Haughan sasha@articulatepr.com.au, 0405 006 035
Rae Begley, Head of Marketing & Communications, Bundanon, rae.begley@bundanon.com.au.
