The APY Art Centre Collective is a group of Art Centres owned and run by ‘Anangu’, or the ‘people’ of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY Lands), a region in the remote, north-west of South Australia. Founded in 2016, the members of the APY Art Centre Collective work with a united vision and voice on collaborative artistic projects and business initiatives, for the benefit of the Anangu community. Art Centres that form the APY Art Centre Collective are; Iwantja Arts, Mimili Maku Arts, Kaltjiti Arts, Tjala Arts, Tjungu Palya, Ninuku Arts, APY Studio Adelaide and Umoona Arts. They are home to more than 500 Australian First Nation’s artists.

The aim of the collective is to support every artist in the collective with their practice and provide a platform for the exposure of their work locally and internationally. For BAB 2022, APY will be showing ten new works, each canvas three-by-three metres in size. From the beginning of the APY art movement, Aṉangu artists have embraced the opportunity to work on a large scale. Generally too large to navigate upright, each painting is made on the ground, usually with the artist or artists sitting within the painting and with the canvas positioned in the direction of the Country it relates to. Cultural custodians of an oral tradition, each artist or group has a distinct visual signature - some proffer dynamic gestures with a pyrotechnical palette while others create a ground of rhythmic mark making that carries Country. All are embedded with ancestral stories and are rich in ‘inma’ (ceremonial song and performance).

With a population of just over 2,500 people, the APY Lands are home to a constellation of art centres dotted across the Lands in the far north-western corner of the state. This selection reflects this constellation from east to west and in doing so echoes the celestial formations that deeply inform Anangu art and culture. Art centres are cultural meeting places, where culture is celebrated, maintained and carefully passed-on to younger generations by Aboriginal Elders. It might be viewed as an expanded model of the professional artist studio, where people come together to work both collaboratively and singularly.

Contemporary Aboriginal art expresses resistance, practical guidance for survival, sometimes in extreme conditions, for generations of First Nation’s Australians and activism in the face of colonisation. This selection invites audiences to experience the creative scope and adaptive nature of Anangu culture and to experience Australian landscape painting anew - not as an act of representation but as a way of being.