In early 2027, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) and Dia Art Foundation present d harding: Inheritance, an exhibition in two parts that are staged simultaneously across hemispheres. The exhibition at MCA Australia is on view from 25 March to 2 August 2027. The exhibition at Dia Chelsea is on view from 19 February to 7 August 2027. Inheritance is accompanied by a co-published monograph, extending the reach of the project to global audiences.
The exhibition at MCA Australia marks harding’s first museum survey and traces a decade of their multidisciplinary practice. The non-linear display is organised around four themes – inheritance, visitation, embodiment and continuity – charting the key conceptual concerns of harding’s recent work, while also highlighting consistent aspects of the artist’s methods, ranging from the use of materials sourced on Country to the atomisation of pigment by breath.
Significant loans drawn from public and private collections are displayed alongside new works, including an expansive iteration of harding’s ongoing ‘wall composition’ Know them in correct judgement (2026). Made in collaboration with members of their extended family, this work exemplifies the artist’s longstanding practice of using the architecture of galleries and museums as a surface on which to animate their rock-art inheritance. A further highlight at MCA Australia is a newly devised presentation of harding’s 2017 installation Body of objects, first presented in Documenta 14: a field of silicone sculptures cast from cultural objects such as boomerangs and clubs, which conjure both the spectre of colonial collecting practices and the artist’s queer identity.
At Dia Chelsea, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the US builds on several years of exchange with Dia, including joint visits to the institution’s land art sites in the American West as well as to the rock-art galleries at Carnarvon Gorge on harding’s ancestral Country in Central Queensland. The new commission at the centre of the exhibition originated from seven canvases harding inherited from the late Brisbane-based conceptual painter Gordon Bennett.
harding loaded the canvases with local ochres and soils and then transferred them to generate over 60 panels, or ‘transfer paintings’, which will envelop the perimeter of the galleries. Each painting maps a particular location while transmuting forms and methodologies central to minimal, conceptual and land art – such as the monochrome, seriality and site-specificity – through the lens of the artist’s culture. harding has also created interventions throughout the exhibition space, such as the application of natural pigments to the windows and skylights to produce shifting levels of opacity in ways that protect and reflect cultural methods and protocols.
By staging a dialogue across geographic and cultural contexts, the exhibition highlights the artist’s critical engagement with how Aboriginal cultural materials and forms of knowledge circulate within the economies of contemporary art. Together, the presentations at MCA Australia and Dia Chelsea bring a focus to diasporic experience and global mobility as explicit frames of reference in harding’s recent work.
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