GROUP EXHIBITION

Curated by Dr Emily Cormack (Aotearoa New Zealand and Naarm Melbourne), who was appointed Head of Exhibitions and Programs at TarraWarra in April 2025, the exhibition brings together ten artists from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Mexico.

Working across sculpture, installation, moving image and assemblage, the artists respond to a world shaped by instability, uncertainty and global precarity. Rather than seeking fixed solutions, System Release explores new ways of organising, sensing and making meaning, proposing order as a form of relationship with chaos.

The exhibition invites audiences to consider alternative systems of knowledge and ways of being, grounded in First Nations thinking, posthumanism, collective intelligence and more-than-human worldviews.

Participating artists: Daniel Boyd, Francis Carmody, Megan Cope, José Dávila, Alicia Frankovich, Marco Fusinato, Nikau Hindin, Nicholas Mangan, Dane Mitchell and Shannon Te Ao

Established in 2013, the TarraWarra International series supports Australian artists to present their work within a global context by exhibiting alongside leading contemporary practitioners from abroad. The initiative situates their practices within international conversations and expands opportunities for critical engagement with contemporary art. Each edition of TarraWarra International has explored key developments in contemporary practice, from relationships between the animate and inanimate to shifting experiences of temporality and speculative responses to the archive, including Animate/Inanimate (2013), Pierre Huyghe (2015), All that is solid... (2017) and The Tangible Trace (2019). Paused during and after the global pandemic, the program returns in 2026 with System Release, curated by Dr Emily Cormack; now alternating every two years with the TarraWarra Biennial, the series remains committed to rigorous curatorial research, ambitious new commissions and providing audiences with accessible, thought‑provoking encounters with major works by leading Australian and international artists.