SYDNEY.- Why are Australia’s young artists looking to the past to make sense of the present?
Eight young artists have sought inspiration in history, memory and the archive. Whether reaching across eons into distant time or exploring moments just at the edge of memory, each tells a profound story about today through the lens of yesterday.
Primavera 2026: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) features new works that tell intimate stories, uncover crimes, investigate cutting-edge technologies and reveal tender moments. They suggest that the past is never truly fixed or forgotten, but something we carry with us to reinterpret and reimagine together.
The horserace time almost forgot
Mark Maurangi Carrol presents a new suite of paintings entitled oro enua, atu enua (‘the horse, the lord of land’), inspired by a New Year’s Day event on the Cook Islands (Avaiki Nui) now only recalled by older generations.
The technology that brings dreams to life
Filmmakers Stanton Cornish-Ward and Trent Crawford premiere their new film Synchresis (Part I), which tackles the unexpected history of the ‘thought-to-image’ technologies that are poised to rewire the brain and our relationship with our own memories.
The queer murder that rocked the Australian Navy
Callum McGrath’s site-specific installation History Piece excavates the story of a queer love triangle turned murder aboard the HMAS Australia II in 1942, bringing attention to a pivotal moment in LGBTQIA+ history.
The journey back to family and Country
Performing spoken-word yarning to camera in her new film Skin to Skin, Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis (Pitta Pitta peoples) uses her hands and her voice to assert an unbroken bond with her great-grandmother, a member of the Stolen Generations.
The tapestries reimagined in the shadow of the Cambodian genocide
Linda Sok’s delicate weavings Deities in Temples grapple with the necessity of invention in the face of loss. Reinterpreting textiles that once adorned temples until they were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, she turns a single colonial record into living culture.
The rocks that may, or may not, have fallen from the stars
Jack Wansbrough’s installation and stained-glass work Meteorite Enquiries is inspired by an archive of ‘meteorwrongs’ sent in by the public to the Western Australian Museum, hopefully but incorrectly identified as meteorites. His work suggests that even the most mundane things contain infinite possibilities.
The smoky silhouettes that reveal a life lived and lost
Working at the intersection of photography and sculpture, Rudi Williams explores the traces we leave in the world around us, including the residues left by decades of smoking in a suburban home that silhouette a long-ago life.
MCA Australia Curator Antares Wells said: ‘Primavera 2026 is about traces. The artists in this year’s Primavera consider the marks that we leave in the world around us, from the geological to the span of a single human life and the diversity of stories that surround us everywhere.’
