Yangamini
Established 2022 in Wurrumiyanga, Tiwi Islands, Australia
Sprung from 2022 Tiyari, hot and humid season of Tiwi Islands
Connected through Tiwi, Gulumirrgin, Warlpiri, Kunwinjku, Yolŋu, Wardaman, Karajarri, Gurindji, Burarra, and other extracted lands and seas
Members: Crystal Love Johson Kerinauia; Francis Jules Kapijiyi Orsto; Ainsley Kerinauia; Nadine Lee and Jens ‘Johnita’ Cheung
UNSW Galleries
Mapurtiti Nonga (Evil Ass Dreaming), 2024
mixed media
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain with generous assistance from the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
Courtesy the artists
On the morning of 2 November 2023, a ship owned by the Santos oil and gas company set out from Darwin to begin laying 263 kilometres of pipes beneath the Timor Sea. As it crossed the breakwater, news arrived that Australia’s Federal Court had granted an emergency injunction, sought by the Tiwi Islands’ traditional owners, to pause construction of the pipeline. Despite the countless testimonies regarding the region’s spiritual importance to the Tiwi people, and evidence that the pipeline would disturb over 150 sites of paleogeographic interest and archaeological potential, the cessation is unlikely to be a lasting victory.
In development since 2004, Santos’s Barossa Project is the latest in a long line of exploitative schemes and colonial projects undertaken in Tiwi. For Yangamini, a guerrilla collective of Tiwi sistagirls, the spread of this corruption is akin to the myth of Mapuriti Nonga, the Evil Ass Spirit. When Mapuriti Nonga talks, “bad gas comes from the ring hole of its mouth. Mouth like a bum hole … this gas gets passed through the belly out the ass of one human … onto the next. This is how Evil Ass dreaming infects our people both mentally and physically.”
Yangamini have created a series of large-scale butt-plugs crafted out of local and traditional materials to metaphorically block the spread of the spirit’s toxicity and rail against the literal gas projects that are threatening to tear holes in their pristine waters. On-screen interviews with Elders and the Yangamini Collective detail the impacts of the gas projects and their intertwined legacy of policymaking.
Remarkably playful, Yangamini challenges missionary sexual oppression, racialised governance, rhetorical sustainability, and mining extractions in the settler Northern Territory with the same strength and dignity that they defend the lands and waters that are rightfully theirs.
***This label was written prior to news on 15 January 2024 that the Federal Court had dismissed a legal challenge made by a group of Tiwi Islanders regarding the construction of Santos’ $5.8bn Barossa project.
Yangamini (“holes” in Tiwi) is a guerilla collective initiated by Tiwi-Warlpiri Sistagirl elder Crystal Love Johnson Kerinauia, consisting of trans and non-binary First Nations and allied communities. The collective accommodates First Nations sexual minorities who seek refuge from the rigid gender customs of mainland communities. Yangamini strengthens gender-fluid bush knowledge and challenges missionary sexual oppression, rentier violence, racialised governance, economic control, rhetorical sustainability, and mining extractions in the settler Northern Territory.
Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.