Watch This Space
Arts NT - Leading Arts Organisations
2025—28

CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENTS
2020—23

EXHIBITIONS

The exhibition program is a hallmark of the WTS annual creative program, showcasing interstate, international and NT-based artists, curators and collectives in our gallery spaces. Selected highlights are below, for the full exhibition program see our website archive.

HIGHLIGHTS

where you from (2023)
An exhibition about being a non-Indigenous POC living on Arrernte

country, about culture, identity and place illustrated through handmade fabrics and ceramics.

We are so excited to announce this important exhibition as the first program presented in partnership between Watch This Space, Situate (TAS) and West Space (VIC), to support a central Australian based artist to develop and tour a new work.

As the recipient of this opportunity, Chris Ng was selected to take part in SITUATE 22-23 as part of a small cohort of artists selected by regional arts organisations across Australia. Chris travelled to Tasmania in 2022 to participate in Situate arts labs, accessed mentorship in Mparntwe-Alice Springs to develop her ceramic skills & received project support from Watch This Space, West Space & Situate.

Famous Fish (2023)
Famous fish is the opportunity taken up to present from Dan Murphy’s 2021 ⁠LOFTY award.

'I first visited WTS in the early days at the iceworks, maybe 93 or 4. I helped out on the board for a bit and then WOW, such an honour, to be awarded "The Lofty" in 2021 means I finally get to have my own show at my favourite gallery.⁠
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Sometimes it's hard to get started but eventually, I did begin making a picture of honeymoon gap. ended up everything in the show was made at honeymoon gap. not the physical location but the honeymoon gap in my head.⁠
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This whole show is result of procrastination about finishing that piece and Im doing it now, writing this is not what I'm meant to be doing today. There's still a few more sculptures trying to squeeze thru that honeymoon gap too, so I'm wondering if I'll ever actually fiinsh it. we'll see.⁠
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Anyway I think I've made a pretty interesting pile of metal work stuff ànd also a whole room full of fish.⁠
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I hope youse like it.'⁠

Animating Principles (2022)
A puppet show

Set in an experimental art space in the desert, this boardroom melodrama tracks infestations of the bureaucratic within the tenuous infrastructure of the poetic. With reverence for thirty years of collective organising at Watch This Space, we witness a meeting of wonky proportions.

Curated by Beth Sometimes & Charlie Freedman

A Thousand Rivers Collided and Changed Direction Within My Chest (2022)
Exhibition + curated screening + book launch w/ Giramondo Publishing & NT Writers Centre

A Thousand Rivers Collided and Changed Direction Within My Chest is a cumulative act of resistance through the personal lens of prominent Yugambeh poet and activist, Lionel Fogarty. The exhibition was the first time Fogarty's raw painted works on paper were shown to the public, exhibited beside a film work collaged from Fogarty's rich archival footage and poetry readings. His painted works on paper hold part-poems, newspaper clippings or archival photographs, and abstract imagery. A desire for a radical shift against structures of colonisation, and a deep sense of Blak-pride, come through Fogarty's subversive and playful use of language.

Alongside the exhibition, Lional Fogerty hosted a screening of Basically Black with a poetry reading at the WTS Walk-In Cinema. This event was produced in collaboration with the NT Writer’s Centre with a facilitated Q&A with Jacyn de Santis.

Drawn by stones (2022)
Exhibition + public program w/ 4A Centre Contemporary Asian Art and Australian Ceramics Triennale

Drawn by stones was a touring exhibition that brought together artists who utilise the ceramic medium to interrogate contested histories, stolen land, Indigenous sovereignty, and national identity. Exhibiting artists from Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan investigated ‘nationhood’ and ownership through ceramics and demonstrated how the ceramic form can both memorialise and tell alternative histories.

In 2022, Drawn by stones was curated by Bridie Moran with Assistant Curators Jody Rallah and Annette An-Jen Liu.

*More information available via the links in text overlay for each exhibition.

WALK-IN CINEMA

The Walk-In Cinema was established in 2020 as a free monthly outdoor cinema screening and food event in the WTS carpark on Gap Rd, supported by Screen Territory and Australia Council for the Arts. Each month a different member of our local communities selects a film program to share with the audience, following a free meal provided by local food partners.

*More information available via the links in text overlay for each exhibition.

ARRERNTE LANGUAGE CLASSES

Arrernte is the local Indigenous language of Tyuretye/Mparntwe (Alice Springs). This six week course follows a sprawling curriculum of language and cultural orientation and education between an on-site gallery classroom and off-site excursions, led by Arrernte elder and educator, and current WTS studio resident, Kumalie Riley.
“If you’re a local you need to know all this.”

COOBER PEDY ARTIST CAMP

The Coober Pedy Artist Camp is a collaboration between Watch This Space (Mparntwe-Alice Springs), FELTspace (Tarntanya-Adelaide) and Coober Pedy community. The program sees artists shape a participatory curriculum in the lead-up to the camp in collaboration, culminating in a week-long intensive collective residency in Coober Pedy and the critically acclaimed Coober Pedy Car Horn Orchestra, a participatory social sound experiment led by the artists. The latter will have the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with folks from Dusty Radio, the Coober Pedy Library, Umoona community, and other local hives of knowledge.⁠

ZINE FAIR

The annual WTS Zine Fair is a thematically sprawling, temporally-finite autonomous zone, where anyone can publish anything they like as a little paper thing you can hold in your hand. A zine is an inherently political tool of self-expression. It can be a self-published story, comic, poster, single-page drawing, open letter, photo journal, flip book, brochure, postcard, sticker, manifesto, etc. The model for making is DIY and you don’t need any experience as a writer, artist or human being.

Alongside the Zine Fair WTS has held workshops, where anyone can make their first, next, or ultimate zine alongside others.