Ku Arts Reconciliation Week 2025 Statement - Artist Spotlight on Ninuku Arts
On behalf of the Board, staff, and communities of Ananguku Arts and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation (Ku Arts), we acknowledge and honour Reconciliation Week 2025 as a time to reflect, to listen, and to act.
This year’s theme calls all Australians to move beyond symbolism and into meaningful action. For Ku Arts, reconciliation means walking together with respect—amplifying First Nations voices, strengthening culture, and supporting self-determined futures for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
As South Australia’s peak Aboriginal Community Controlled arts organisation, Ku Arts works every day to uphold the power of cultural expression as a path to healing, truth-telling, and equity. From the desert to the sea, we stand alongside artists, art centres, and communities whose stories and practices are central to Australia’s cultural landscape.
This week, we invite our partners, audiences and broader communities to celebrate the strength and resilience of Aboriginal artists, to reflect on the history that shapes us, and to commit to genuine partnerships grounded in truth, justice and respect.
Reconciliation is not a single act, but a shared journey. Ku Arts remains steadfast in our role to champion this journey through art, culture, and connection.
This year, Ku Arts has chosen to mark Reconciliation Week by profiling a number of our artists and art centres, sharing their reflections on what reconciliation means to them and how culture, art, and community continue to lead the way forward.
What’s your name and where abouts are you located?
Ninuku Arts, Kalka SA
Tell us a bit about your art centre history?
Ninuku Arts was founded in 2006 by a group of Pitjantjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra artists in a small mud-brick building in Kalka Community, located in the far northwest corner of South Australia. Currently, the art centre supports a rotating roster of forty artists and makers living in both Kalka and Pipalyatjara, which are the most remote communities of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands.
What does this year’s Reconciliation theme ‘Bridging Now to Next’, reflects the ongoing connection between past, present and future mean to you?
Thinking about this year’s reconciliation week theme, bridging now to next, the artists reflected on the old people who taught them, both painting and culture. Heather Watson describes learning to paint by watching her mother, and the pride of going to Adelaide to see her mother’s canvas in an exhibition. Heather now paints her mother’s country, Murray bore, in Western Australia. Angkaliya Nelson also reflects on learning inma and stories: “I learned at Amata school, and then I moved to Pipalyatjara with my husband, I learned from all the old ladies here, they’re all passed away now.” Many of the artists at Ninuku are continuing the painting traditions of their families and elders, and the stories they paint are a direct link to the people who came before. Art centres play an important role in helping to preserve and pass down these stories.
The artists also reflected on the importance of teaching the kids to carry these stories and culture strong into the future. “I always go to the school and teach the kids painting, weaving tjanpi and inma,” Angkaliya Nelson says. She also reflects on the importance of the art centre in providing an income to support families. “The money from the canvas help us pay for food for the kids. Kids are the future.” Angkaliya and her daughter Rowena paint together at the art centre, Rowena says she learned from watching her mother paint.
What’s your proudest moment as an art centre?
The Ninuku team are most proud of the way their art centre continues to support two communities, Kalka and Pipalyatjara, and provide artists from these communities with a safe place to gather, work and share stories and for the income the art centre provides to help support their families.
