A new exhibition in Delhi introduces museumgoers to Australian Aboriginal songlines

Inside the Humayun’s Tomb World Heritage Site Museum in New Delhi, a story from a distant land comes alive. A domed ceiling lights up with images of rock art, constellations and star clusters. Sparkling within this illuminated display is an Australian Aboriginal epic narrating the story of seven women—sisters and celestial beings—as they flee from a shape-shifting pursuer.

The exhibit is one of 300 displays from Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, now on display at the museum. Conceived by The National Museum of Australia in partnership with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, the exhibition introduces the Indian audience to songlines, an oral tradition intrinsic to First Nation Australian heritage. Incorporating art, music and storytelling, songlines connect the communities with the land, cultural practices and spiritual traditiona. The Songlines  exhibition made its debut in 2017 in Canberra, Australia, and arrives in India after touring throught United Kingdom, Germany, France and Finland.

On display are five sections of the Indigenous Western and Central Desert songlines through a mix of visual arts, artifacts, music and dance, photography and multimedia presentations. First Nations art takes the spotlight and the Seven Sisters songline is translated into a variety of mediums. In “Minyma Punu Kungkarangkalpa” (Seven Sisters Tree Women), artists of the women-led social enterprise Tjanpi Desert Weavers create fibre art sculptures while ceramics become the canvas for “Kungkarangkalpa” by Ernabella Arts, Australia's oldest, continuously running Indigenous art centre. Paintings by Aboriginal artists, rife with colour and finely detailed, abstract motifs, also bring to mind the folk art of Gond and Warli tribes—not merely in the recurrence of dots and lines, but also in their symbolic and spiritual value.

This common visual language makes India a particularly meaningful venue for the exhibition. Katherine McMahon, National Museum of Australia director, described India as a venue “where ancient connection are deeply shared” while Australian High Commissioner to India, Phillip Green OAM, has called the exhibition another step in growing relations between Australia and India. For Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, this exhibition marks the latest move in a longer collaboration with Australian Aboriginal art. In 2024, the museum had hosted the Walking through a Songline exhibition in Delhi.

(The exhibition will run at Humayun's Tomb World Heritage Site Museum till March 1, 2026.)