Image: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
The Art Gallery of South Australia will present James Tylor: Turrangka...in the shadows from 31 July to 1 November 2026, offering what it describes as the most comprehensive selection to date of the artist’s practice. The exhibition brings together more than a decade of work, including daguerreotypes, expansive digital photographic series, and hand-made Kaurna cultural objects and furniture, and it is shown in partnership with UNSW Galleries, Sydney.
The exhibition is positioned as a significant survey of Tylor’s ongoing work across photography and cultural making. AGSA says the show focuses on a practice that uses photographic intervention to disrupt how images are read, including by removing information from prints or inscribing language and place-names onto daguerreotypes. That approach places the exhibition at the intersection of contemporary photography, Indigenous cultural knowledge and questions of how Australian history is visually constructed.
The title Turrangka...in the shadows is drawn from a Kaurna word. According to AGSA, turra can mean shadow, reflection, image and mirror, underscoring one of the central concerns of Tylor’s practice: the learning and sharing of Indigenous language. That framing gives the exhibition a wider cultural resonance beyond a conventional retrospective, linking visual form to language revival and to the artist’s Kaurna identity.
Tylor’s work also turns to the making of objects and images that reimagine material traces of Kaurna culture. AGSA says the exhibition includes recreations of Kaurna cultural artefacts, architecture and ephemera, alongside antique photographic techniques such as Becquerel daguerreotypes and hand-tinting. These processes are used to generate what the gallery calls a new archive of pseudo-historical images, one that responds to absences in the visual record of colonial Australia.
That emphasis on absence and redaction gives the exhibition particular significance in the wider art world. By altering the photographic surface and challenging established image histories, Tylor’s work addresses how Indigenous presence has been represented, overlooked or erased in colonial visual culture. The survey format allows audiences to see how these concerns have developed across a sustained body of work rather than in isolation.
AGSA says the exhibition is free to enter and will be presented during the SALA Festival. It forms part of a broader program that also includes CIPX Kaurna Miyurna (Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange with the Kaurna Community), which runs from 26 June to 1 November 2026 in Gallery 7. For the gallery, which notes that it stands on Kaurna land, the exhibition extends an institution-wide commitment to presenting work grounded in local First Nations knowledge and contemporary artistic practice.
