29 May – 23 August 2026
Curtin University presents Christopher Pease: Terra Nullius, a survey exhibition of 25 years of practice by leading Noongar artist (Minang/Wardandi/Bibbulmun) Christopher Pease. Featuring significant loans from major public and private collections, alongside new large-scale works, Christopher Pease: Terra Nullius reveals Pease’s sustained interrogation of sovereignty, land, and power.
The exhibition title invokes the legal fiction of terra nullius – the doctrine used by British colonisers to claim Australia as “nobody’s land,” – denying the existence of Aboriginal societies with complex laws, cultures, and custodianship of Country. For Indigenous Australians, terra nullius sanctioned dispossession, cultural erasure, and generations of structural injustice. Pease employs the term ironically, exposing its violence and absurdity through layered painterly interventions.
Kart-warra, 2019, oil and Balga resin on linen, 150x280cm
At the heart of Pease’s practice is a dialogue between Western art traditions and Indigenous storytelling, memory, and Country. His visual language juxtaposes European conventions of landscape and figurative painting with Indigenous iconography and narrative structures, creating layered compositions that reveal overlapping histories and multiple ways of knowing.
Christopher Pease - Terra Nullius
John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University
May 29 - August 23, 2026