Join Adnyamathanha artist Kristian Coulthard, Nukunu curator Dr. Jared Thomas and writer Dr Darren Jorgensen as they discuss the latest exhibition at the SAMSTAG Museum of Art, Mulka Yata: The Knowledge of Place and the accompanying satellite display at the South Australian Museum in this celebration of Adnyamathanha culture as part of 2024 NAIDOC celebrations. The panel will discuss the genesis and development of the exhibition while exploring the landscape and ecology encompassing the Ikara-Flinders Ranges region of South Australia.

Dating back to Earth’s earliest continent formation, known as the Adelaide Geosyncline, this mountainous region was established hundreds of millions of years ago and contains the Warratyi rock shelter, the oldest known site of human habitation on the continent and the ancestral home of the Adnyamathanha people for the past 50,000 years. It is also the site of the Nilpena Ediacara National Park, with fossil evidence of Earth’s earliest complex animal life, dating back 550 million years.

Mulka Yata: The Knowledge of Place illuminates the ancient landscapes, histories and peoples of the region and proposes an historically layered, geological and cross-cultural conception of place. Join us at the South Australian Museum as the panel unpacks these themes.

Mulka Yata: The Knowledge of Place is a Samstag Museum of Art exhibition with the South Australian Museum, curated by Erica Green, Samstag, and Nukunu man Jared Thomas, South Australian Museum.

EVENING PROGRAM

6:00pm - Doors open and welcome drinks served

6:30pm - Presentation begins

7:25pm - Presentation ends and Q&A begins

7:45pm - Event concludes

8:00pm - Museum closes

About the Sprigg Salon Series

The Sprigg Salon series provides audiences with access to the latest thinking around cultural, scientific, and natural world research and discoveries here in South Australia and around the world. It is named in honour of Dr Reg Sprigg AO, a remarkable South Australian geologist who discovered the world’s oldest fossilised animals in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges in 1946, now recognised around the world as the Ediacara fossils.

The Sprigg Salon series is supported by Beach Energy and Inspiring South Australia.

Image: Kristian COULTHARD, Akurra, installation view, South Australian Museum Collection. Photograph by Malcolm McKinnon.

Image description: Photograph of created serpent artwork made from wood, feathers and echidna quills.