Campbelltown Arts Centre will open two new exhibitions on 27 June, pairing a major new commission by Indonesian artist Zico Albaiquni with a touring show by Western Sydney artist Kirtika Kain.
The combined presentations bring together distinct practices shaped by cultural heritage, lived experience and long engagement with questions of history, land and material. While each artist works in a different visual language, both exhibitions open up ideas around how memory is carried, recorded and reworked through art.
Albaiquni’s commission, titled To all the steps that shake the land’s memory, features two large-scale paintings developed through his ongoing interest in how collective memory is formed through bodies, gestures and shared practice. The works continue his exploration of land, water and people as connected forces that shape one another over time.
His practice draws on the Indonesian concept of lukis, which he describes as a process tied to ritual, labour and everyday life rather than a fixed method of painting. As the artist explains, meaning does not arrive fully formed before the work begins, but develops through making and exchange. He has said that the work continues beyond the studio, shaped by encounters and relationships once it enters public space.
Albaiquni often works from existing imagery that carries personal, cultural and colonial associations. Through layering and disruption, familiar references are altered rather than resolved, allowing tensions within history and representation to remain visible.
His recent exhibition history includes the Adelaide Biennale in 2026 and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2025, with his latest works developed in part through residencies at Campbelltown Arts Centre. He lives in Melbourne and continues to move between Australia and Indonesia, maintaining ties with Bandung and Ciamis.
Alongside this, Kirtika Kain presents Pitch, an exhibition first shown at Murray Art Museum Albury and now touring to Campbelltown. Her work continues a long-standing focus on caste, class and material value, particularly within diasporic contexts.
Kain, who was born in New Delhi and now works on Darug Country in Western Sydney, has said she has often felt isolated in Australian art spaces when addressing caste directly. She has also spoken about the importance of building connections across communities who navigate different but related social and political structures.
In Pitch, materials such as gold, bitumen and turmeric are used to build layered surfaces that shift between visual intensity and material history. The works draw attention to the origins of these substances, including extraction, labour, ritual use and trade, while resisting fixed readings of value or meaning.
Kain’s practice treats materials as carriers of history rather than neutral substances. Gold and turmeric carry cultural and symbolic weight across multiple contexts, while bitumen evokes industrial extraction and infrastructure. In combining them, she invites viewers to consider how these histories sit alongside each other without being resolved into a single narrative.
Both exhibitions encourage a slower form of looking, where interpretation is shaped by time spent with the work rather than immediate recognition. Albaiquni’s paintings hold back easy resolution, while Kain’s surfaces shift between attraction and discomfort, leaving space for individual reading.
Speaking about the program, Campbelltown Arts Centre Director Mouna Zaylah said the two exhibitions reflect artists engaging with complex personal and collective histories through materially driven practice. She noted that both artists bring perspectives shaped by Western Sydney, with Kain raised in the region and Albaiquni’s work informed by residencies at the centre.
Campbelltown Arts Centre is located on Dharawal land in South West Sydney and works across multidisciplinary programs with artists and communities locally and internationally.
Exhibition dates: 27 June – 13 September 2026
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