Maningrida Arts & Culture

MANINGRIDA Arts & Culture is a pre-eminent site of contemporary cultural expression and art-making, abundant with highly collectable art and emerging talent.

Through their homelands resource organisation, Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation, artists turned an art trade that began just over 50 years ago into an arts and cultural enterprise.

Ways of learning and schools of art in Arnhem Land are based around a system of passing knowledge and information on to others. The art here has its genesis in body design, rock art and cultural practices, in concert with more than 50 years of collaborations, travel and political action to retain ownership of country. Values and law are expressed through language, imagery, manikay (song), bunggul (dance), doloppo bim (bark painting), sculptures, and kun-madj (weaving) – the arts.

Maningrida Arts & Culture is based on Kunibídji country in Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory. The area where artists live encompasses 7,000 square kilometres of land and sea, and over 100 clan estates, where people speak more than 12 distinct languages. Aboriginal people in this region are still on country, surviving and resilient because their country is the centre of their epistemology, their belief system, culture – djang.