Image: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
The Art Gallery of South Australia has opened CIPX Kaurna Miyurna (Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange with the Kaurna Community), a tintype portrait series that celebrates important members of the Kaurna community in Tarntanya (Adelaide), on Kaurna Yarta. Running from 26 June to 1 November 2026 in Gallery 7, the exhibition is free to enter and presents the latest chapter of an international Indigenous portraiture project now being adapted through a Kaurna lens.
The works form part of the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange, or CIPX, a project first conceived by Diné artist Will Wilson in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The initiative invites Indigenous photographers from around the world to make portraits of members of their local communities using the nineteenth-century tintype process. At AGSA, Kaurna artists Damien Shen and James Tylor have contributed portraits that extend that model into the Kaurna community and its relationships to country, family and representation.
AGSA says the project seeks to recontextualise early photographic documentation of Kaurna people produced by European colonists and anthropologists in South Australia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The gallery frames the new works as a deliberate departure from those earlier images: the CIPX portraits are described as differing significantly from European colonial photographs of Aboriginal people, particularly in the way they place agency with the sitter rather than the photographer.
That shift is central to the project’s significance. According to the gallery, the CIPX process centres the Indigenous sitter’s autonomy, with participants controlling how they are represented. The original tintype photographs are returned to the sitter, and reproductions are shown only with permission. In AGSA’s installation, those reproductions are presented at large scale on aluminium, giving the portraits a public visibility while retaining the project’s emphasis on consent and respect.
The exhibition also sits within a broader institutional context for AGSA, which notes that it stands on Kaurna land and identifies its location with the Kaurna phrase, “AGSA Kaurna yartangka yuwanthi.” Against that backdrop, the show is more than a portrait series: it is a contemporary museum response to the history of visual control exercised over Aboriginal subjects, and a practical example of Indigenous artists reshaping the archival form that once served colonial classification.
The subject matter is also locally specific. CIPX Kaurna Miyurna centres people from the Kaurna community in Tarntanya, bringing a community-based portrait project into a major public institution. By working through the tintype, a process associated with early photography, Shen and Tylor link historical medium and present-day Indigenous authorship in a way that invites viewers to reconsider who has historically made images, for whom they were made, and who benefited from them.
AGSA lists a second related exhibition, James Tylor: Turrangka...in the shadows, opening later in the year. Together, the presentations underline the gallery’s continued focus on Indigenous art and on exhibitions that connect historical material with current cultural practice. For the wider art world, CIPX Kaurna Miyurna matters because it shows how photography can be used not to repeat colonial looking, but to restore authority to the people being photographed.
