In June 2017, Utrecht’s Aboriginal Art Museum (AAMU) closed its doors — permanently. Funding ran out (as it does) and the collection found a new home at the Wereldmuseum (Leiden, Rotterdam, & Amsterdam). The closure hit doubly hard because it was the only museum dedicated to contemporary Australian Aboriginal art in Europe. Founded by a private collector in 1999 and open since 2001, it set out to tell a story that began in the early 1970s, when Papunya Tula, the Western Desert art movement, flipped tradition on its head.

Following the forced displacement and relocation of multiple Aboriginal desert communities to Papunya, a school mural inspired by ceremonial designs sparked a radical shift in expressive, creative activities: sacred visual languages, once confined to sand and bodies, were translated onto walls and scrap materials. Though the original mural was later erased, its impact endured, prompting artists to develop new public forms for ancestral stories and giving rise to what is now recognised as contemporary Indigenous Australian art.

Historically, artistic production had always been collective and governed by strict ceremonial rules. Without a written language, knowledge was mainly transmitted orally through sung poetry. “It’s like a collective consensus,” former museum director George Petitjean explains, “always part of the collective. So in traditional times, in order to transmit knowledge, a large group of people came together [to sing] poems.” Innovation and individual style were discouraged, even sanctioned, since the integrity of the songs, stories, and creation narratives depended on the collective accuracy rendered by faithful communal reproduction.

In this light, art was a vessel of intergenerational labour, memory, and shared responsibility. Singular genius risked corrupting knowledge. Breaking collective consensus could be punished, and knowledge needed to be protected. When artists did begin to innovate, sacred ceremonial designs could not be shown outright, publicly in their original form. Reconfiguration ensued, and the making of new visual languages was necessary. Designs, or rather adaptations of them, that once lived on sand, bodies, or ephemeral surfaces found their way onto canvas and board. What was ritual became portable, marketable, and, alas, collectible.

Suddenly, art that had never been meant to travel was flying across the world into galleries, fairs, and international acclaim. Meanwhile, this shift forced a move from collective obligation toward individual authorship — an unfamiliar and paradoxical position for artists raised in communal systems.

Emily Kam Kngwarray exemplifies this transformation. Born around 1910 in the Central Australian desert, she began painting in her 80s, producing thousands of works in just a few years. Her paintings, often described as abstract by Western audiences, depict “Dreamtime,” which, according to Petitjean, “can’t be translated because it has nothing to do with dream and it has nothing to do with time.”

“It’s actually a parallel dimension to the time as experienced by human beings…the Dreamtime, as it used to be known, but now more generally referred to as the Dreaming or the Everywhen, is a dimension of energy that is responsible for continual creation, for the creation of the earth, of plants, of animals, of everything that roams the planet. So the Dreaming is as well what we would call the mythological past or creation myths, but is also the here and now. The Dreaming is not finished, it is a continual process because as long as there is life on earth, there is the Dreaming.”

So what appears as abstraction in Western terms is, in her work, a way of painting land, memory, and ceremony without revealing restricted knowledge. The Dreaming signifies a continuum of energy linking land, life, and knowledge, dissolving the Western binaries of self and world, artist and art. In this view, artistic practice enacts relationships rather than merely representing them. Landscape becomes a state of being rather than a scene to be viewed.

For over sixteen years, AAMU showed more than 800 works, its impact felt beyond metrics. It was a hub, a diplomatic platform, and a kind of embassy for Aboriginal art in Europe. Major exhibitions opened under the eyes of Dutch ministers, visiting Aboriginal elders, even royalty. Since the museum’s closure, the torch has been passed onto Fondation Opale, a private collection in the Swiss Alps founded by Bérengère Primat. With over 1,900 works, the Foundation promotes Indigenous Australian art, comprising major pieces by artists like Kngwarreye and Clifford Possum.

Yet the shift back into private hands underscores an ongoing precarity of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art. Even as market visibility and prices rise (Kngwarreye’s Earth’s Creation I, for example, doubled in auction value over a decade) access and institutional support do not, leaving the collective, intergenerational, and ecological frameworks that sustain this oldest living artistic tradition vulnerable. Their survival is dependent on fragile infrastructures and private patrons rather than robust, publicly supported networks. It completely goes against why anyone would appreciate this art in the first place.

It is into this fraught context that the exhibition Elles. Contemporary Australian Indigenous Women Artists, lands in Geneva at the Musée Rath. Curated by Petitjean (now head curator at Opale) from the Foundation’s collection and produced in conjunction with Geneva’s Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (MAH), the theme first reads as a kind of celebration of female artists, responding to the historical tendency for male artists to dominate visibility.

Until the 1990s, Indigenous women’s voices in Australian art were often invisible. They shaped the expansive canvases and intricate bark paintings alongside male relatives, yet their contributions rarely bore their names. All the artists shown come from remote regions of Australia, particularly Central Australia and Arnhem Land, and many are now deceased.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great — women artists, finally visible, finally named. Exhibitions that frame women as singular figures are necessary interventions in a canon that has historically excluded them, but these exhibitions also operate within a relatively recent, historically charged framework: one that prizes individual authorship, genius, and visibility.

For most of human history, art was not the product of a lone maker. It was communal: embedded in ritual, storytelling, survival, and the transmission of social knowledge. Skill circulated within groups and objects mattered more than names. The figure of the celebrated “artist” emerged relatively late, entwined with systems of modernity, capitalism, and property that valorise individuality and competition. Within this framework, the figure of the celebrated woman artist seems both corrective and contradictory: it remedies historical exclusion but still remains entangled with the very logic that necessitated such correction.

If feminist projects foregrounding women aim to sidestep hierarchies, isolation, and erasure, how can they recognise labour without flattening the networks, traditions, and ecologies that sustain it? Ecofeminist thought reminds us that the forces which historically marginalised both women and environments also shape what is legible as value. To that end, creation is never isolated; it is relational, ecological, and inseparable from the conditions that make it possible.

This tension becomes especially vivid in Aboriginal art, where “landscape” is not a neutral stage for expression but a living presence. In Indigenous Australian worldviews, land is entangled with life, story, and Dreamtime. To create a landscape is to move within relational ecologies. It is inhabited, shared, and extended across communities, ancestors, and Country, a process in which the artist is part of the land itself rather than standing apart from it or merely painting it.

In this context, the idea of a solitary “genius” collapses, but it all comes to a head when, on the upper level, I encounter a painting that looks almost identical to a well-known Monet.

Standing there, looking at the painting, I am slightly disappointed — not with the art, but with myself. I have to remind myself that, while it may initially recall Monet because of colours, that resemblance is not intrinsic; it is learned. Art history has trained me to see European masters as benchmarks, to measure innovation against a specific cast. But this painting emerges from an entirely different logic, and that’s not something that we have been trained to recognise.

Unlike Impressionism, this work is not about capturing fleeting light but inhabiting the cycles and vitality of Country. As Petitjean observes, the resemblance is superficial: “For her, it goes much further. It is a landscape in a continual state of being, growing, expanding, withering, returning after rain. It’s a fixed picture, yet it conveys energy. It is not a representation of landscape as we know it in the western artworld. It’s a representation of landscape and the energy that makes it. It is a representation of land in its state of being. They are self-portraits as well. Emily is part of the landscape.”

The resemblance to Monet tells us less about influence than about the frameworks through which art history teaches us to see. Indigenous women’s paintings are not frozen moments; they are enacted, relational, and situated in cycles of ecological and ceremonial life. The artist is not outside the landscape, observing it, but embedded within it — part of its rhythm, memory, and energy. Recognition, then, is not about isolated genius; it emerges from networks of care, knowledge, and place, where land, story, and body move together.

From a decolonial perspective, this reflex to compare reproduces what Walter Mignolo calls the coloniality of knowledge: European categories function as normalised points of comparison for interpretation.

Indigenous theorists like Leslie Marmon Silko and Linda Hogan insist that land is a living archive and visual expression arises from responsibility to place rather than formal innovation. Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges reinforce this insight: seeing is always from a position within a network of relations. Monet’s fame is not a natural measure of genius but a socially stabilised construct; Indigenous women’s painting, emerging from collective knowledge and ceremonial life, challenges the singularity of authorship itself.

Genius is merely a social achievement: Monet’s acclaim depends on collective recognition, while Indigenous women’s work emerges from sustained communal and ecological practice. The encounter stages a quiet reordering of perspective, and that is no easy feat. Exhibitions that hold this tension invite viewers to move beyond resemblance and see art as a living process, where land, story, care, and connection remain inseparable — but the transformation must first be modelled by the institution before it is adopted into collective consensus.

Through Opale’s collaboration with MAH, the works, first and foremost, return to the public sphere. They move beyond private stewardship and into civic display. Authorship, like value, emerges relationally. Here, the task of exhibition is not to resolve difference through analogy but to hold open a space in which multiple genealogies of meaning coexist without collapsing into a single hierarchy.

To encounter the paintings is not to memorise new names or recall familiar ones, but to attend to relations: land and mark, body and season, story and surface. The question shifts from resemblance to responsibility — from what the work looks like to how it lives within networks of care, knowledge, and continuity.

ELLES. Contemporary Australian Indigenous Women Artists at Musée Rath

Pl. de Neuve 1, 1204, Geneva

more info here