Kaylene Whiskey – Ngura Pukulpa - Happy Place, 2022

Kaylene Whiskey flies above her Country in a glittering dress and hot-pink wig, calling out both her English and Yankunytjatjara names. Ngura Pukulpa– Happy Place unfolds like a music video, reimagining the Seven Sisters, an ancestral creation story in which seven women are pursued across Country, shaping the land before rising into the sky as the Pleiades constellation of stars in the sky. Whiskey recasts their journey as a convoy of Land Cruisers and popstar glamour. Ancestral figures move through the desert alongside Wonder Woman and Dolly Parton, while Whiskey places herself and other Anangu women at the centre of the action. Her futurism does not leave Country behind. Camp humour keeps the work buoyant, allowing inherited stories and contemporary popular culture to occupy the same present, with Anangu women firmly in command of both.

Kaylene Whiskey is a Yankunytjatjara artist from Indulkana in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. Using a bold visual language that draws on Central Desert painting alongside comic and media imagery, she reworks familiar symbols through humour and invention. Her work centres joy as a mode of expression, where play becomes a way of asserting presence, reconfiguring representation and sustaining community.

La Biennale de Lyon acknowledges all First Nations peoples of Australia, their Traditional Custodians of the lands, and Elders past and present. We honour the enduring strength, diversity, and richness of First Nations artistic and cultural practices. We recognise First Nations peoples as Australia’s first artists, whose creative traditions have been sustained across millennia and continue to shape the Nation’s cultural landscape today.