Alana Hunt’s solo exhibition and major commission, A Deceptively Simple Need, extends her ongoing investigation into the everyday violence of non-Indigenous life on unceded land.  

The exhibition follows Hunt’s earlier film, Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023), which presents a close study of non-Indigenous life on Miriwoong Country, in and around the town of Kununurra in far northern Western Australia—where Alana lived for over a decade. The film concludes: ‘It is a story about the violence that underpins our deceptively simple need for a home on other people’s land.’   

Stemming directly from these words, Hunt’s new work examines the so-called ‘Australian Dream’ of home ownership within a settler-colonial context. Central to the works are the artist’s own experience of housing insecurity, reflections on the current housing crisis, and a critical reading of state-sponsored films made in Western Australia during the 1960s and 1970s, when the State celebrated its one millionth citizen.  

The exhibition spans intimate and collective histories that are transposed into the present through film, video, photography, objects and paper. By accentuating the sonic and visual materialities intrinsic to her processes of writing, filming and printing, Hunt disrupts fixed timelines that relegate colonial violence to the past.  

With feeling and historical insight, A Deceptively Simple Need offers a sensitive study of the injustices embedded in the basic need for a home within a settler-colonial system often obscured by the habits of daily life. Guest curated by Jasmin Stephens, A Deceptively Simple Need is the fourth in a series of annual commissions funded by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. Delivered in partnership with PICA, the $80,000 Commission supports a mid-career artist to develop a major body of work.  

Visitor information: This exhibition includes a work that references suicide and racist language. Viewer discretion is advised.