The past enters a museum already arranged. It arrives as an object, a photograph, a remembered story or an institutional record, carrying not only what happened but the decisions that determined what was preserved and how it came to be understood. A document appears authoritative because it has been kept; a photograph appears conclusive because it remains visible. Less apparent are the acts of selection, omission and interpretation that shaped the record long before it entered the gallery.
How history becomes visible is the central concern of Primavera 2026: Young Australian Artists, curated by Antares Wells at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney. Bringing together Mark Maurangi Carrol, Stanton Cornish-Ward and Trent Crawford, Callum McGrath, Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis, Linda Sok, Jack Wansbrough and Rudi Williams, the exhibition explores how history is preserved, reconstructed and contested through painting, photography, film, sculpture, textiles and installation. Across these practices, the artists examine the different forms through which historical knowledge is produced, transmitted and experienced.
It is an ambitious proposition. History, memory and the archive have become familiar subjects in contemporary art, often invoked so frequently that they risk becoming curatorial shorthand rather than critical ideas. Primavera 2026 succeeds not because it revisits these themes, but because it distinguishes between different forms of historical evidence. A family memory is not equivalent to a military record. A painting developed from recollection does not make the same claim as a colonial photograph. A woven textile does not preserve history in the same way as an institutional archive. Each carries a different claim to evidence and authority.
The exhibition’s lens-based works bring these questions into their sharpest focus. Rudi Williams, Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis, Callum McGrath, and the collaborative practice of Stanton Cornish-Ward and Trent Crawford do not use photography and moving image simply to illustrate histories established elsewhere. Their works ask how an image acquires authority: through its material form, the institutions that preserve it, the voices it permits or excludes, and the technologies through which it is produced and encountered.
Photography is not the exhibition’s dominant medium. It is, however, where its central questions become most precise.
Photography as Matter
Rudi Williams works across photography, sculpture and installation, employing historical and contemporary photographic processes as physical and spatial forms. In In the air we breathe, photography is no longer confined to the conventional framed print. Large translucent and coloured panels are positioned within slender black steel supports extending from floor to ceiling, while smaller photographic works occupy the surrounding walls. Rather than forming a continuous sequence of framed images, the works are dispersed throughout the gallery, and their relationships shift as viewers move through the space.
The installation draws on residues left by decades of smoking in a suburban home, where accumulated traces preserve silhouettes associated with a life no longer present. Rather than treating these traces simply as evidence of absence, Williams places them in dialogue with photographic processes, considering how material surfaces retain the marks of lived experience over time.
The formal proposition is straightforward but significant. A framed photograph usually separates the image from its surroundings, encouraging the viewer to focus on representation alone. Williams refuses that separation. The supports remain visible, the photographic surfaces occupy different positions within the gallery, and the work draws attention to the physical conditions through which photographs are produced, displayed and encountered.
Within an exhibition concerned with the ways history is preserved and reconstructed, In the air we breathe shifts attention from the photograph as transparent record to the photograph as material object. Its significance lies not in demonstrating photographic technique, but in recognising that the forms through which images survive are themselves subject to time, change and vulnerability.
The Right to Speak
If Rudi Williams approaches photography through its material presence, Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis considers its relationship to voice and authority. A Pitta Pitta artist working across photography, moving image and spoken word, Romanis draws on family histories and institutional archives to examine the colonial systems through which Indigenous people and Country have been represented and interpreted.
In Skin to Skin, Romanis performs spoken-word yarning directly to camera. The MCA describes the work as affirming her continuing connection with her great-grandmother, who was a member of the Stolen Generations. The personal address is therefore inseparable from a history in which family relationships were fractured through state intervention and institutional violence.
The installation presents two moving-image portraits side by side. In one, Romanis faces the camera more directly; in the other, she appears in profile. The visual language is restrained. Rather than relying on archival montage or historical reconstruction, the work centres on the act of speaking itself. Romanis appears not as an historical subject to be interpreted, but as the author of her own address.
This distinction is significant. Colonial photography frequently made Aboriginal people visible while denying them authority over how their images were produced, interpreted and circulated. Skin to Skin does not attempt to erase that history. Instead, it repositions the camera as a site from which Indigenous knowledge and lived experience can be articulated rather than extracted.
The paired projections reinforce this shift. The frontal view establishes direct address, while the profile refuses the expectation that a single image can provide complete knowledge of a person. The two views remain distinct, resisting the idea that portraiture can ever produce a definitive account of identity.
Headphones further shape the encounter. Romanis can be seen from across the gallery, but hearing her spoken words requires a more deliberate act of listening. Visibility and audibility no longer coincide. The work asks not only who is represented, but who is heard.
Rather than treating inclusion within the image as an end in itself, Skin to Skin considers the conditions through which authority is established. Romanis places the power to speak within the work itself, shifting attention from the subject of the photograph to the voice that determines its meaning.
History and the Archive
Callum McGrath approaches related questions through queer history and the archival records through which marginalised lives become visible. Working across installation, sculpture, photography and video, McGrath examines how queer histories have been narrated and remembered, and how those narratives have been shaped by institutional systems of power. His site-specific History Piece draws on the story of a queer love triangle that ended in murder aboard HMAS Australia II (1942).
Queer histories have often reached the present through official records produced when queer lives came under institutional scrutiny. Such documents may preserve essential information, but they do not offer neutral access to the people they describe. The record frequently survives because an institution regarded a life or relationship as a problem requiring documentation.
History Piece confronts the ethical difficulty that follows. Recovering an obscured history may be necessary, yet recovery can also repeat the categories through which that history was first recorded. McGrath’s movement between photography, moving image, sculpture and installation acknowledges that no single medium can fully reconstruct a life from its surviving documents. A photograph may establish that someone existed; an archive may verify an event. Neither can restore the complexity of lived experience.
The title History Piece is exact. It refers both to an artwork about history and to a fragment drawn from it. The past does not arrive intact. It survives through records that have already been selected, preserved and interpreted.
McGrath’s work is most compelling when it resists the promise of complete retrieval. Bringing an overlooked history into the museum does not undo the conditions under which it was marginalised. Instead, the installation asks viewers to consider how historical knowledge is organised, and how archives preserve evidence without ever containing the entirety of the lives they record.
Romanis and McGrath therefore approach historical visibility from different directions but share a scepticism towards the archive as a final authority. Romanis restores the authority to speak within the image; McGrath examines records that cannot be separated from the institutions that produced them. In both practices, photography does not resolve history. It reveals the conditions through which history becomes visible.
Images After the Camera
Stanton Cornish-Ward and Trent Crawford extend the exhibition’s concern with mediation towards emerging technologies that may shape how images are produced and understood. The artists and filmmakers investigate how new technologies influence ideas of history, memory, truth and agency. Their film Synchresis (Part I) examines the unexpected history of thought-to-image technologies and their possible effects on the brain and our relationship with memory.
The work is presented through screens of markedly different scale. A large projection occupies a black wall, showing a purple-toned figure extending one hand, rendered with a visibly electronic texture. Elsewhere in the gallery, a smaller monitor on a white pedestal displays an apple core isolated against a pale background. Rather than merging into a seamless installation, each screen retains its own material presence and scale.
Throughout Synchresis (Part I), the apparatus remains visible. The projection retains a distinctly electronic image quality, while the smaller monitor remains an identifiable object within the gallery. Images are encountered through different screens and under different conditions of viewing, drawing attention to the material forms through which they are presented.
The installation therefore resists treating technological images as transparent records. Thought-to-image systems promise new ways of visualising mental activity, yet the resulting images are produced through technical processes that remain largely inaccessible to those who encounter them. The work does not attempt to explain these technologies in scientific terms. Instead, it asks viewers to consider the authority increasingly granted to computational images and the systems through which they are produced.
Photography has traditionally maintained a material relationship, however complex or mediated, with something that once stood before the camera. Thought-to-image technologies complicate that relationship by proposing images whose sources lie beyond ordinary visual observation. Cornish-Ward and Crawford do not present this shift as either celebration or warning. Instead, Synchresis (Part I) places emerging technologies within a longer history of mediated image-making, asking how new forms of visual representation may come to acquire authority before the processes that generate them are fully understood.
The other practices in Primavera 2026 clarify what is distinctive about the exhibition’s engagement with photography. Mark Maurangi Carrol explores memory, identity and diasporic experience through painting. Linda Sok’s weaving practice, grounded in her Cambodian heritage, reflects on distance, absence and inherited history. Jack Wansbrough works through sculpture and archival material, examining how objects preserve and transform historical knowledge. Together, these practices demonstrate that the past is carried not only through photographs but also through material traditions, acts of making and systems of cultural transmission.
Seen together, the exhibition’s lens-based works resist the familiar idea of photography as a transparent witness. Williams considers the photograph as a material object shaped by time and display. Romanis reclaims the authority to speak within the image. McGrath examines archives whose records cannot be separated from the institutional conditions that produced them. Cornish-Ward and Crawford ask how emerging technologies may alter the authority granted to future images.
What connects these practices is not a rejection of photography but a sustained attention to the conditions through which images acquire meaning and credibility. Across the exhibition, photographs, films and archives are presented not as neutral records of the past but as material, technological and cultural forms through which history is continually organised, interpreted and transmitted.
Rather than asking visitors simply to remember the past, Primavera 2026 asks how the past becomes visible in the first place. Across painting, photography, film, sculpture, textiles and installation, history emerges not as something recovered intact, but as something continually shaped through images, objects and acts of interpretation. It is this sustained attention to the conditions under which history is made visible that gives the exhibition its lasting critical force.
Exhibition Details
Primavera 2026: Young Australian Artists
Curated by Antares Wells
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Tallawoladah/Sydney
27 June – 28 September 2026
