PRIMAVERA: Young Australian Artists

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Sat 06 Jun 2026 - Sun 26 Jul 2026

PRIMAVERA: Young Australian Artists is the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s (MCA) annual exhibition for artists aged 35 years and under, presenting work by six early-career artists that challenge society’s prescribed structures to deliver compelling alternatives to the status quo. In its 32nd year, PRIMAVERA 2023: Young Australian Artists is guest curated by Talia Smith, who considers what artists are creating to challenge society’s prescribed structures. According to Talia Smisth, what brings these artists together is the way they reckon with the perils of history, education, culture, and language to question authoritative structures and systems. They assert that there is more than one way of living and offer impressions of how it might look.

Talia Smith is an artist and curator from Aotearoa who is now based in Sydney, Australia. She has curated exhibitions for organisations such as the Singapore International Photography Festival, IMA, UTS Gallery, Ballarat Foto Biennale and Cement Fondu, among others. Her writing has appeared in various publications such as Memo Review, Art New Zealand and artist catalogue essays and books. She has completed research residencies in Singapore and Germany and currently works as the curator at Granville Centre Art Gallery.

Through works of various media, including installation, video, painting, sculpture, mark-making and text, the six artists draw on their lived experience to disrupt the dynamics of power and deliver compelling alternatives to the status quo. PRIMAVERA 2023 artists, including:

Tiyan Baker (b. 1989, Garramilla/Darwin) is a Malaysian Bidayh-Anglo Australian artist who works with installation, photography, video, and sculpture. Her practice draws on historical research, language, digital processes, and material play to trace unseen relationships between words, place, and stories.

Christopher Bassi (b. 1990, Meanjin/Brisbane) is an artist of Meriam, Yupungathi and British descent. Working with archetypal models of representational painting, his work engages with the medium as sociological and historical text and as a means of addressing issues surrounding cultural identity, alternative genealogies, and colonial legacies in Australia and the South Pacific.

Moorina Bonini (b. 1996, Naarm/Melbourne) is a descendant of the Yorta Yorta Dhulunyagen family clan of Ulupna and the Yorta Yorta, Wurundjeri, and Wiradjuri Briggs/McCrae family. An artist whose works are informed by her experiences as an Aboriginal and Italian woman, her practice attempts to disrupt and critique Eurocentric ideas of the Indigenous, especially within western institutions.

Nikki Lam (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is a Hong Kong-born artist, curator and producer based in Naarm/Melbourne. Working primarily with moving images, her work explores hybridity and memory through the contemplation of time, space and impermanence.

Sarah Poulgrain’s (b. 1992, Thul Garrie Waja/Townsville) practice draws on self-sustainability and artist-led pedagogy to expand what art institutions can do. Though they produce sculptures, their practice is primarily concerned with building and sustaining respectful and non-hierarchical relationships.

Truc Truong (b. 1987, Tarndanya/Adelaide) is a visual artist based on Peramangk and Kaurna Country, Adelaide. Her art practice is primarily focused on assemblage and installation.

PRIMAVERA was initiated in 1992 by the MCA in collaboration with Dr Edward Jackson AM and Mrs Cynthia Jackson AM, in memory of their daughter Belinda. Since its inception, PRIMAVERA has played an influential role in the development of contemporary art in Australia, introducing a generation of artists at an early stage of their careers to a broader public. Each year, the curator of PRIMAVERA undertakes extensive research, travelling across the country to meet young artists.

Located at Murray Bridge Regional Gallery, 27 Sixth Street, Murray Bridge, PRIMAVERA: Young Australian Artists will be exhibited from Saturday, 6 June to Sunday, 26 July 2026. PRIMAVERA 2023: Young Australian Artists is kindly supported by Gordon and Tasmin Jackson and MCA Next.


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