Artist in conversation: Karlina Mitchell with Dan Toua
photo access
1pm Saturday, 23 May at photo access
Join exhibiting artist Karlina Mitchell for a discussion exploring her exhibition Nanuma, facilitated by independent curator Dan Toua.
Nanuma is a body of work that disrupts the authority of the colonial photograph. By centring the perspectives of iTaukei people, this body of work looks at the stories held in landscapes, our collective ways of remembering, and seeks to transform the colonial gaze into a platform for self-representation and cultural continuity.
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Artist in conversation: Karlina Mitchell with Dan Toua
Event artists
Karlina Mitchell
Karlina Mitchell is a multidisciplinary artist whose work examines how layered cultural identities shape the formation of self and ideas of belonging. Using photographic practice as a base to then alter the photograph and create installations within spaces, she transforms images into immersive environments that reflect memory, displacement, and connection to place. Drawing on personal history and community narratives, her work holds space for complexity and contradiction. Mitchell invites audiences to reflect on their own relationships to heritage and home, proposing identity as fluid and continually evolving, shaped by experience, environment, and the ongoing negotiation between past and present.
Dan Toua
Dan Toua is an arts worker and independent curator living and working on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country. She is currently working at the ANU School of Art & Design Gallery, having previously been a Curator of Pacific Art at the National Gallery of Australia and Associate Curator and Gallery Manager for Canberra Contemporary. Dan is a sessional lecturer in Art History and Curatorial Studies and a PhD candidate at the Humanities Research Centre (both at the Australian National University). Her PhD research investigates the curation of Pacific cultural materials in Australian national cultural institutions, with the goal of creating a Curatorial Handbook that will aid in sustainable, relevant and culturally sensitive curatorial practices in this area.
Dan is a first-generation Australian with Indian, Papua New Guinean and Fijian heritage and bases her curatorial practice on cultural autonomy, two-way relationships and knowledge sharing. In her work Dan strives to be an effective part of the global push for the re-imagination of cultural collections, exhibition development and curatorial methodologies that focus on anti-colonial and (re)indigenised practices.
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