COSMOLOGIES Nikau Hindin

Cosmologies brings together the work of Nikau Hindin and Naminapu Maymuru-White into an exhibition that generates dialogue shaped by the night sky. Across Indigenous knowledge systems celestial bodies are not distant matter but living presences, they are repositories of law, memory, navigation, spirit energy and ecological care. Stars orient seasonal cycles and kinship structures, binding people to land, sea, and sky. In this exhibition, cosmology is not metaphor but method: a way of mapping relations across generations and more-than-human worlds. A way to locate our own position in this world and in this life. Working with aute (barkcloth) and bark painting respectively, both artists translate lived astronomical knowledge into contemporary abstraction while remaining grounded in ancestral responsibility.

Emerging from sustained engagement with Te Ao Māori, specifically cosmological knowledge, Hindin’s work centres on the reinvigoration of traditional cultural practices. Inscribing natural pigments onto aute, made from paper mulberry by the artist, she charts stellar movements in alignment with the maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar. Lines extend across the cloth as diagrams of time, translating navigational knowledge into material form. The compositions function as both star maps and environmental compasses, encoding rising and setting points of stars along the horizon. Hindin reactivates systems of orientation, but also techniques disrupted by colonial imposition. Mapping here is an act of remembering – locating knowledge in the body, in material, and in time.

Grounded in Yolŋu cosmology, particularily the Milŋiyawuy – the river of stars known in Western astronomy as the Milky Way – Maymuru-White’s practice renders the night sky as a living lineage-based current. Using black and white ochres on bark, she renders dense, rhythmic constellations and flowing star rivers that carry tribal narratives of origin, journey, and obligation. These shimmering fields trace celestial, earthly and watery pathways at once, binding sky to water, land to spirit, and present life to ancestral presence and energy. Sky and earth form a continuous field of relation: the celestial is inseparable from daily life, ceremony, and clan law. The Milŋiyawuy is not depicted as distant cosmos but as an active continuum of relation and belonging.

In bringing these bodies of work into conversation, the exhibition highlights how both artists transform sky-world cosmologies into material languages: Their works reciprocally unfold systems of memory and embodiment – one activating cyclical celestial knowledge as an embodied cartography rooted in whenua, maramataka, and deep ecological awareness, the other echoing ancestral songlines across space and generation. Installed in proximity, these works generate a shared field of orientation, creating complementary systems of memory and orientation – one tracing the ancestral river of stars as living law, the other mapping stellar cycles as environmental and cultural navigation.

Without translating cosmology into Western scientific terms, Maymuru-White and Hindin assert Indigenous knowledge systems as dynamic, sovereign and contemporary. Cosmologies invites viewers to encounter the night sky as a living archive: a continuum of story, of life force and movement, and of responsibility that continues to shape ways of being in the present.

Curated by Anja Lückenkemper