Tjanpi Desert Weavers and the Art of Indigenous Survivance

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is about recent art of Tjanpi Desert Weavers, the not-for-profit, social enterprise of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council, as practices of eco-somatic feminist Indigenous ‘survivance’. Kuka Irititja (animals from another time) and Tjituru-tjituru (Tragedy, Grief and Sadness), produced in creative collaboration with non-Indigenous artist Fiona Hall, focus on death, extinction, annihilation. Whose lives, whose deaths mattered in the past; whose lives, whose deaths matter today. These works reference the British testing of nuclear bombs at Maralinga in the desert homelands of the artists in the 1950s and explore living-on in the aftermath of relentless settler colonial devastation, as Rene Wanuny Kulitja says of her work for Tjituru-tjituru: ‘these are for the ones who were born but never lived’. Developing a close analysis of the works, situated in a broader framework of remote avantgarde or Aboriginal art under occupation, this article explores how these works address a past that is not past for Anangu/Yarnangu women today and the vital importance of the work of Tjanpi Desert Weavers art production in the present.