Welcome to this special edition of artists in conversation, presented by the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. For the final season of programming in 2025, PICA turns our attention to works that reflect on notions of home and belonging. This is a timely conversation given that Western Australia has just become Australia’s most expensive state, and we find ourselves amid a deep housing crisis.
Central to this is Alana Hunt’s solo exhibition and major commission, A Deceptively Simple Need, which extends her ongoing inquiry into the everyday violence embedded in non-Indigenous life on stolen land. The exhibition is on view at PICA until 21 December.
Alana Hunt is a non-Indigenous artist living on Gadigal Country in Sydney, after spending more than a decade on Gija and Miriwoong Countries in the north of Western Australia. Her practice consistently turns towards Australia’s ongoing conversation about our right to a home.
With this new exhibition, she holds a microscope to our everyday lives as non-Indigenous people inviting us to look closely, uncomfortably, at the ordinary habits and materials that quietly sustain colonial life.
She asks us to think about colonisation not as a single event, but as something built slowly and relentlessly: one house at a time, one brick at a time.
This exhibition is made of Alana’s own experience of insecure housing, reflections on the current housing crisis and a critical re-mixing of state-sponsored films made in Western Australia during the 60s and 70s when the state celebrated its one millionth colonial citizen.
Joining Alana in conversation is Kieran Wong, a non-Indigenous director and co-founder of Fulcrum Agency, a creative consultancy working at the intersection of community, social impact and evidence-based design thinking based in Walyalup Fremantle. Kieran is also the Chair at Shelter WA, the peak body for housing and homelessness in WA and is an Adjunct Professor at Monash University. Kieran works towards creating better communities through provision of affordable and site-responsive housing and community infrastructure
Together, they unfold a slow and considered dialogue shaped by Alana’s exhibition – examining what it means to live here in Australia on stolen land, through the lens of their practices and lived experiences.
A guiding thread in Alana’s work is articulated in the words of former Victorian Supreme Court justice Kevin Bell.
‘In Australia, the origin of the idea that housing is to be valued primarily as a commodity for producing private wealth is colonisation. It is part of our creation story.’
The quote is so integral to the project that it’s the first thing that greets you upon entering the exhibition.
Alana and Kieran delve into a dialogue that is complex, nuanced, and far from finished. We hope audiences take away a renewed attentiveness to their own everyday life here in Australia, and feel invited to carry this ongoing conversation forward.
Alana Hunt: A Deceptively Simple Need is supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund as part of the Copyright Agency Partnerships (CAP) Commission series and through the generosity of PICA’s Art Commissioners.
