“This exhibition is not just a presentation of Aboriginal art. It is a statement of belief.” - Hank Ebes (1996)
In 1996, within the vaulted halls of Oud Sint-Jan in Bruges, a landmark exhibition unfolded — Nangara. It brought together more than 350 works by over 108 Aboriginal artists from the Ebes Collection, creating one of the most significant international presentations of Australian Aboriginal art to that date. Each canvas, each mark of pigment, carried with it the weight of the world’s oldest continuing culture, a culture whose depth and continuity stretches back tens of millennia.
Curated by Hank Ebes, Director of the Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings in Melbourne, Nangara was not conceived as a mere display, nor as a didactic presentation of ethnographic artefacts. It was founded instead upon conviction: the belief that these works — born of land, law, and story — are not to be confined within the lens of anthropology, but must be seen and recognised as fine art of the highest order. In his own words, Ebes described the exhibition as more than a display: “This exhibition is not just a presentation of Aboriginal art. It is a statement of belief.” It was a declaration that Aboriginal voices and visual traditions belonged within the global canon of contemporary art.
The very name Nangara was itself a gift, bestowed by the late Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, one of the most acclaimed and pioneering figures of the desert painting movement. Possum, who described the Melbourne gallery as “a very special place,” imbued the exhibition with a title that carried both cultural gravity and spiritual resonance. That spirit carried into Bruges, animating the halls of Oud Sint-Jan, and lived through every canvas exhibited there — works that spoke with immediacy, truth, and unrelenting depth.
At the heart of Nangara stood a centrepiece of astonishing magnitude: the Emily Wall. Composed of 53 interconnected panels painted in Utopia, Northern Territory, by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, the work represented the pinnacle of her visionary practice. Brought together in a single unified composition, the wall was unveiled to the world for the first time in Bruges, confronting audiences with a scale and intensity that was at once overwhelming and transcendent. In its presence, abstraction and cultural cartography merged, evoking both the intimacy of Country and the vastness of Dreaming.
The opening night of Nangara became an historic gathering. More than 400 guests assembled despite the cold, drawn by reverence rather than spectacle. Among them stood artists such as Barbara Weir, Fred Torres, and Malcolm Jaggamara, alongside esteemed figures of the art world including Simon Levie, former Director of the Rijksmuseum (1975–1989). Their presence was not incidental; it was testament to the trust, the history, and the significance of what had been achieved.
Yet Nangara is remembered not only for what it exhibited, but for what it stirred. Its impact was not confined to the walls of Oud Sint-Jan, nor to the months it remained on display. Rather, it reverberated in discourse, in memory, and in the shifting perceptions of Aboriginal art on the international stage. As Ebes later reflected, “What is presented here is not just art, but art with purpose. Art that speaks of survival, spirit, and sovereignty.”
Nearly three decades on, the message of Nangara continues to echo — bold, unfiltered, and unforgettable. It endures as a moment in which the authority of Aboriginal art was asserted with clarity and conviction, where the works of desert masters and urban voices alike entered into dialogue with the global art world not as outsiders, but as equals.
Fraser McCullough, 2025.