Now You’re Speakin’ My Language is a new digital commissioning partnership between the Institute of Modern Art and NOWNESS Asia.

Curated by Kate ten Buuren, five artists with Australian First Nations, Southeast Asian, and Asia Pacific backgrounds present new video works that reflect on the ways that language and story connect us across oceans, rivers, lands, imposed borders, and time.

Join us for a screening of the newly commissioned films, followed by a conversation between ten Buuren and artist Tiyan Baker.

COVID-19 Advice

The IMA strongly encourages mask-wearing onsite in the galleries and for events to keep our community safe. If you are displaying symptoms of COVID-19 or are feeling unwell, please stay home. ⁠

Accessibility

We are committed to making the IMA accessible to people of all abilities, their families, and carers, as well as visitors of different ages and different backgrounds.

The gallery entrance is on the ground floor of the Judith Wright Arts Centre, on Berwick Street. There is wheelchair access and an accessible toilet with baby changing facilities also located on the ground floor, and we welcome guide and support dogs.

If you plan to attend this event and have specific support needs we can accommodate, please contact engagement@ima.org.au, call (07) 3252 5750, or ask our friendly staff on-site. Read our access information for visitors here.⁠

Guest Biographies

Tiyan Baker is an artist working in photography, video, sculpture, and installation. She draws on historical research to trace unseen relationships between words, places, and stories. Centring her Bidayǔh culture in her works, she is interested in things she has unknowingly inherited. Living far from her native lands, culture, and family, in the midst of the recolonisation of Borneo, she explores all that can be mistranslated or lost and what can manifest in its place. Part salvaging and part speculating, her imaginative storytelling and world-building reclaims her indigenous heritage in the face of intergenerational shame and disadvantage, systematic destruction of culture, and geographical disconnection from kin. Born and raised on the Larrakia lands known as Darwin, she lives on the Awabakal and Worimi lands known as Newcastle, Australia.

Kate ten Buuren is a Taungurung curator, artist, and writer working on Kulin Country, who investigates collective and collaborative ways of working. Her interest in contemporary art, film, and oral traditions is grounded in self determination, self representation, and the power of knowing one another. She is the founder and active member of First Nations arts collective This Mob, who make space for young artists to connect and create on their own terms. She is a curator at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne/Naarm, and was previously curator at Koorie Heritage Trust.