Exhibitions

Knowing Otherwise is a major group exhibition exploring how artists enact ancestral, spiritual and embodied ways of knowing amid eroding trust in government and dominant Western frameworks.

Knowing Otherwise continues MUMA’s longstanding commitment to exhibitions that ask what counts as knowledge, and who has the power to define it. The exhibition brings together new commissions, works from the Monash University Collection, and key loans by Australian and international artists. Among these are works by Vali Myers and Rosaleen Norton—visionary, fiercely independent Australian artists of the mid-twentieth century—whose practices provide historical precedents and are honoured here as ‘foremothers’ of the exhibition. Their work draws on relational and intuitive forms of knowing that have persisted in defiance of dominant Western frameworks.

Today, rising authoritarian populism, extremist movements and declining trust in government have thrown twentieth century knowledge systems into question. Artists and communities disillusioned by the promises of liberal democracy and the assumption that modernity would deliver freedom and progress are turning to heterodox, ancestral and embodied ways of knowing. Here, ‘heterodox’ refers to knowledge systems long marginalised or dismissed as irrational. From mysticism and the occult to Indigenous storytelling and ritual, these ways of knowing re-enchant the present and offer meaningful alternatives to institutional narratives.

Against this backdrop, Knowing Otherwise explores how artistic practice channels these knowledge traditions into acts of resistance and transformation. Ritual, belief and imagination become tools for navigating a world in crisis and for challenging the authority of secular rationalism, colonial legacies and patriarchal power.

Artists
Paola Balla (Wemba Wemba, Gunditjmara), Carla Cescon, Yin-Ju Chen, Mel Deerson, David Egan, Gail Mabo (Meriam), Naminapu Maymuru-White (Maŋgalili), Clare Milledge, Tracy Moffatt, Vali Myers, Rosaleen Norton, Leyla Stevens, Heather B. Swann, Suzanne Treister, Karina Utomo

Curators
Stephanie Berlangieri, Amanda Haskard (Gunaikurnai) and Francis E. Parker

Image: Karina Utomo, Mortal Voice 2025. Performance documentation, Basilica, Dark Mofo, 2025. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Lucy Foster.