TarraWarra Museum of Art today announced the return of its TarraWarra International series – paused during and after the pandemic – with TarraWarra International 2026: System Release, curated by Dr Emily Cormack (Aotearoa/New Zealand and Naarm/Melbourne), who was appointed Head of Exhibitions and Programs at TarraWarra in April 2025.
TarraWarra International 2026: System Release brings together ten artists from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia and Mexico who reach into the chaos of global precarity to create new systems of order across a wide range of media. The exhibition proposes a different understanding of order as a kind of friendship with chaos, presenting personal and collective strategies for making sense of a rapidly changing world.
Responding to recent global events that have exposed the vulnerability of civic order, the exhibition challenges the assumption that a so‑called “rules-based order” is what holds society together. It frames collapse as a release, inviting audiences to consider alternative systems of knowledge and ways of being grounded in First Nations thinking, posthumanism, collective intelligence, and more-than-human worldviews.
Curator and Head of Exhibitions and Programs, Dr Emily Cormack, says: “We look to artists to expose, explore and interpret precarious global conditions, offering us new perspectives and new ways of being in the world. As international systems of law and governance become increasingly contested, this exhibition forecasts creative approaches that move beyond the tenuous, imperfect pacts that have held the last century in place. As these systems collapse, they also release, creating space for new organising principles, where humans might develop with technology, where Indigenous knowledge is more central, and where the interconnectedness between humans and nature is reaffirmed.”
Director of TarraWarra Museum of Art, Dr Victoria Lynn, says: “The TarraWarra International series was inaugurated in 2013 with Animate/Inanimate, followed by Pierre Huyghe (2015), All that is solid… (2017) and The Tangible Trace (2019). Each exhibition has brought compelling and relevant international artists to TarraWarra Museum of Art, often in dialogue with Australian artists.