Knowing Otherwise
Exhibition dates
7 February – 2 April 2026
Opening event
Saturday 7 February 2026, 3 – 5pm
Artists
Paola Balla (Wemba Wemba, Gunditjmara), Carla Cescon, Yin-Ju Chen, Mel Deerson, David Egan, Gail Mabo (Meriam), Naminapu Maymuru-White (Maŋgalili), Clare Milledge, Tracey Moffatt, Vali Myers, Rosaleen Norton, Leyla Stevens, Heather B. Swann, Suzanne Treister, Karina Utomo
Curators
Stephanie Berlangieri, Amanda Haskard (Gunaikurnai) and Francis E. Parker
About the exhibition
Knowing Otherwise is a major group exploring how artists enact ancestral, spiritual and embodied ways of knowing amid eroding trust in government and dominant Western frameworks. From mysticism and occult traditions to First Nations storytelling and cosmologies, the exhibition brings together artworks incorporating collective ritual, image-making, systems of astrological and diagrammatic mapping, sound and embodied performance. Rather than treating such practices as marginal or esoteric, the exhibition approaches them as living systems that have long shaped community life and cultural endurance. They predate, exceed and persist despite efforts to suppress or contain them.
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 by the assumption that modernity would inevitably deliver freedom and progress—are turning to heterodox forms of sense-making long excluded from institutional narratives.
The exhibition includes new commissions, artworks from the Monash University Collection and significant loans by local and international artists. Among them are the late mid-twentieth-century Australian artists Vali Myers and Rosaleen Norton, framed here as visionary ‘foremothers’ whose defiantly independent practices offer vital historical precedents for many of the contemporary works on display. Both cultivated an intensely personal spiritual world and lived beyond artistic and social conventions, dismissed by the art establishment even as they were embraced by underground, occult and countercultural communities. Explicitly or latently, many artists in the exhibition continue and expand these legacies.
Four overlapping threads weave through the exhibition: matriarchal mythologies and the divine feminine; witchcraft and the historical maligning of women; the slippage between pagan and Christian systems; and First Nations understandings of Country as interconnected across sea, sky and land, including star knowledge, and other cosmological approaches.
Across the exhibition, artists unsettle the assumption that authority rests solely in rational or empirically verified forms of understanding. By foregrounding intuition, spiritual inheritance and embodied experience, they propose these practices as rigorous and culturally vital forms of knowledge.
Visitor advice
The exhibition includes depictions of nudity and sexuality. Some works reference traumatic historical events. The exhibition also includes immersive sound and low-light environments.
Access information
Physical access: MUMA is a ground-floor, wheelchair-accessible gallery with accessible and all-gender bathrooms. Gallery spaces are on a level surface. Contact us for a parking map or further information.
Images: Karina Utomo and Bhenji Ra, WETAN 2025 (detail). Performance documentation, Soft Centre Festival, Whitebay Power Station, Sydney, 2025. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Ravyna Jassani; Rosaleen Norton, Three Witches c.1951 (detail). Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington. Gift of Dr and Mrs C. B. Christesen, 1986; Paola Balla, Mok Mok Cooking Show #2, 2016 (detail). Courtesy of the artist; Suzanne Treister, TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS/Diagram/Reinvented Technologies 2020–23 (detail). Courtesy of the artist; Annely Juda Fine Art, London; and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York; Vali Myers, Lamia 1997 (detail). Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, Narrm/Melbourne; Mel Deerson, Immodest Acts 2023 (detail). Performance documentation, Prato, Italy, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Claudia Gori