Dia Art Foundation Teams Up with MCA Australia on Two-Part Exhibition for Indigenous Artist d harding

New York’s Dia Art Foundation will co-present a two-part exhibition of work by the Indigenous Australian artist d harding to be split between Dia Chelsea and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney. The New York component will open in February, with the other part slated for March; both will run into August of next year.

“A through line in harding’s practice is the concept of transfer—a consideration of how histories are carried through materials, techniques, and places, transporting ancestral knowledge into dialogue with the spaces in which their work is encountered,” Dia curator Jordan Carter said in a statement. “Presented in parallel at two institutions, bridging Australia and the U.S., this two-part exhibition reveals the iterative logic, conceptual depth, and cultural resonance of harding’s practice.”

For the Dia show, harding has drawn inspiration from a number of site visits to the foundation’s storied Land art holdings in the American West—which include Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels—as well as rock-art galleries on harding’s ancestral Country in Central Queensland. A new commission for the Dia exhibition is a series of “transfer paintings” involving canvases that harding inherited from fellow artist Gordon Bennett, processed with earthen materials, and then transferred to 60 panels that evoke locations with a significant sense of place.

The show at MCA Australia, harding’s first museum survey, will be organized around four themes—inheritance, visitation, embodiment, and continuity—and will include an expansion of the artist’s “wall composition,” titled Know them in correct judgement (2026) and made in collaboration with extended family members in mind of their inheritance of rock-art.

Of harding’s importance at home and abroad, MCA Australia senior curator Anneke Jaspers said, “Their work powerfully recalibrates dominant notions of the sovereign, the center, and the canon from an Aboriginal perspective.”