Emily Kame Kngwarreye in Canberra - the shock of the old, says JEREMY ECCLES.

National Museum of Australia Canberra

Opens 22 August 2008

It often seems to be the case that great Australian achievements need the validation of overseas approval. But the fact that Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye was a vast tribute to the Aboriginal artist conceived and presented by the Japanese (specifically Professor Akira Tatehata, Director of the National Museum in Osaka) is both a sad foreign validation of something we should have known from the start and a necessary displacement of Emily’s art to somewhere it isn’t limited by what we all think we know about its origins in a grubby humpy in the Simpson Desert.

Image: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Emu Woman, 1988-1989, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 92 x 610cm. Courtesy The Holmes à Court Collection.

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