Exhibitions: 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.

Betty Kuntiwa Pumani: maḻatja-maḻatja (those who come after) is the first major museum survey of celebrated Anangu artist Betty Kuntiwa Pumani. Her luminous paintings portray the desert landscape of Antara, her mother’s Country in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in north-western South Australia. Using a rich palette of red earth tones, bright blue waterholes, and delicate stippling that evokes white tobacco flowers, her works convey both the physical beauty of the land and the deep cultural narratives tied to it.

The exhibition includes significant loans from institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, along with early works from the Mimili Maku Arts Cultural Collection – some of which are being shown publicly for the first time. These provide insight into the evolution of the artists style and her deepening connection to Country and culture.

Curated by Rachel Kent, CEO of Bundanon, in close collaboration with the artist and Mimili Maku Arts, the exhibition also introduces a major new commission titled Antara (2025), created specifically for Bundanon.

The title, maḻatja-maḻatja, is a Pitjantjatjara phrase meaning “those who come after”, embodying the idea that everything done today is already part of the future. It speaks to a continuous thread of ancestral knowledge, cultural care, and environmental stewardship that links past, present, and future generations.

David Sequeira: The Shape of Music presents four distinct bodies of work by the artist across a range of media, including a significant new commission created especially for Bundanon. Sequeira’s practice is grounded in an enduring fascination with colour, geometry, and sound. His delicate paintings on music manuscript paper – layered with precise geometric forms – create visual ‘chords’ of vivid colour, inviting a sense of presence, contemplation, and the infinite.

The newly commissioned work, Form from the Formless (Under Bundanon Stars) (2025), features 30 music stands, each displaying manuscript sheets hand-painted with imagery of Bundanon’s shimmering night sky, interwoven with Sequeira’s signature geometric patterns and accompanied by a soundscape.

Two earlier series included in the exhibition further explore Sequeira’s investigation into tonal variation and colour intensity through print and glass. Created in collaboration with the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne and the Glass Studio at JamFactory, these works highlight the dynamic movement of colour – advancing and retreating with the viewer’s gaze. His expansive arrangements of transparent glass vessels evoke colour and form in constant flux, reflecting on time as something both fluid and interconnected.

Head to Bundanon‘s website for the exhibition and event details

Art Museum open 10am – 5pm Saturday, 10am – 4pm Sunday.

Image: Betty Kuntiwa Pumani, Antara, 2020 (detail), synthetic polymer paint on linen. Courtesy of the Artist, Mimili Maku Arts and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Photograph: Jessica Maurer. Image, © Betty Kuntiwa Pumani/Copyright Agency, 2025