From a refugee camp to global acclaim: Atong Atem finds her place

Starting primary school in Australia as a six-year-old, Atong Atem was astonished by what she found. She and her family had come from a refugee camp in Kenya, where she and her brothers made figurines out of the clay from the ground and instruments out of cardboard boxes.“The art supplies in the art room, it was like a wonderland to me,” she says. “It was from one world to another, I was just blown away by all these books, the playground, all this stuff ... and it was all free and people were encouraging me to engage with it all.”The first major survey of the 35-year-old’s work opens at the NGV next week. Called Passage: The Art of Atong Atem, it includes 65 of her photographs, several never seen in Australia.Atong Atem at PHOTO 2022. Luis Enrique AscuiHer art is powerful, political and playful, combining portraiture with painting and textiles, with influences spanning from her South Sudanese Dinka Bor heritage through to science fiction, the cosmos and colonisation. Often using her body as a canvas, Atem explores ideas around performance, both in daily life and in front of a camera. Atem and her family immigrated to Australia from South Sudan, having spent time in a refugee camp in Kakuma in north-west Kenya. They settled on the central coast of NSW in 1997; Atem moved to Melbourne in 2014. Now a mother of two, she has been working full-time as an artist for the past 12 or so years; her love for making art stems back to childhood.“Before I felt that I could be an artist, I felt pressure … to take advantage of the fact that my parents had sacrificed so much in order for my siblings and I to have as much opportunity as we can, and way more than they did. So I thought I’m going to work really hard in school and I’ve always liked school. I was such a nerd,” she says, with a laugh.After school, she briefly studied architecture, then moved on to painting and photography; all those disciplines are melded in her practice.“I’m deeply curious, consistently researching, I love to learn. Knowledge is my hobby, I guess,” she says. Her work includes references from “my entire life, my relationship to the world… I just have an intuitive response to colour and composition and subject.”Atong Atem, Ego 2, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and MARS Gallery.For Ego 2 (2019), Atem painted her face blue, linking the indigo to poetic references of blue-black skin used in Black literature, music and poetry. For her, the colour is a symbol of her cultural connection. “Skin becomes a character. Whether we like it or not, our bodies get read. Choosing to engage with that through colour and stylisation becomes a conscious act,” she says in notes for the show.Atong Atem, Henna 1, from the Banksia series, 2021. National Gallery of VictoriaHer work is informed by her upbringing and displacement and by her community, which she credits regularly, saying that with the exception of her self-portraits, all her work is collaborative. The Banksia series, created for the Immigration Museum in 2021, reflects this approach, with Atem shooting friends and members of her community. The show’s co-curator, Anna Honan, NGV assistant curator, contemporary art, says that in these collaborative works, Atem is “breaking down the idea of power in a photography studio”.Atem’s work has been shown at London’s Tate Modern and Victoria and Albert Museum, Fotografiska Shanghai, Rotterdam’s Wereldmuseum, Stadtgalerie in Germany and the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam.She is one of several Australian artists featured in On Country: Photography from Australia which just opened at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum, first shown in 2025 in Arles, France. A solo show is planned for Sydney next year.Atong Atem, Scar 2, from the Scars and Constellations series, 2024. Courtesy of the artist © Atong AtemThe Scars and Constellations series was created for Shadows on the Atlantic, a show by artists of African descent that looked at the impact of colonisation, commissioned by the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam in 2024. The series was a response to the museum’s space, a former shipping yard for the Dutch East India Company.“So it was literally part of the whole mechanism of colonialism,” Atem says. “It wasn’t an analogy or metaphor, it was literally a colonial force. So the ships would come in and get fixed there, and lots of cargo would come in and out.”It was, she says, really powerful to have people who had been directly affected by colonisation making work that was uncensored and unapologetic. “When we talk about my art within a global context, you can’t ignore the fact that my family was displaced because of colonialism,” she says. “We ended up in Australia and the reason we’re here and who welcomed us and all that sort of stuff is directly linked to colonialism.”Since having children, Atem is more and more occupied by the issue. “Because I think about, not the legacy that I will personally leave, but what are they inheriting? What’s the dialogue that they then pick up from? And is it fair? Is it truthful? Is it reasonable? Time will tell, I guess.”Atem’s What we are given (2024) was commissioned by the National Maritime Museum, Amsterdam.Atong AtemPeople’s relationship to colonialism in Australia “tends to be kind of removed”, says Atem. “It feels really distant because in so many ways I feel like this is an example of a successful colonial project.”Working with international artists for the Amsterdam show, there was a lot of discussion about post-colonial thinking, literature and art; people would ask her about the post-colonial reality in Australia. “I don’t know if we can call it that, actually,” she says. “Because the colonial powers arrived and stayed and didn’t relinquish power.”Atong Atem, Men in this town, 2024. Courtesy of the artist © Atong AtemFor Honan, Scars and Constellations considers “how water is often seen as a symbol of renewal but it also carries these histories and memories of violence and the sea then becomes a colonial tool”.“[Atem] also draws this quite beautiful connection between the ship as a vessel and the human body as a vessel, particularly women’s bodies.”A stunning large-scale wall installation, As Above, created specifically for Passage, explores stories from the sky and weaves together Dinka dance, traditional beading and Catholic iconography. It references the idea of the false cross, groups of stars that mimic – and are often mistaken for – the Southern Cross.Another work, the stunning Maria of Mars (2022), subverts the idea of wealthy women with their lap dogs from art history. In the work, part of the NGV’s collection, Atem’s face is painted green as she poses with an Italian greyhound named Rooster.Atong Atem’s Maria of Mars (2022).Courtesy of the NGVIn the final room is Atem’s latest offering, This Happened to You, inspired by Tarot cards. Six images from the deck are printed on large cotton, banner-like flags. Honan says that in these works, Atem is “thinking about Tarot as this enduring and cross-cultural system of symbolic image making … placing South Sudanese women into these ancient archetypes and reclaiming this mythology that exists across so many cultures”.Atong Atem’s Three of cups, from the This Happened to You series, 2025. © Atong AtemAtem has returned to painting recently, despite not having much time to work now with very young children (with her partner Otillo Page). Though physically tired, “my actual creative brain is on steroids”, she says.In her studio are several unfinished paintings, including one she’s been working on for more than two years. “That’s my signature, to start and not finish,” she quips. Some, created when she was a teenager, give an early glimpse of her potential.Another was painted in South Sudan when she visited in 2011, the year of its independence. The work depicts people standing shoulder to shoulder, talking. “The news stations were showing the live celebrations and because we had a bad reception on the TV we were watching, it just made these beautiful, painterly stills of people in the audience watching this momentous thing happening.”Atem says much of her art springs from a quest for knowledge about life and the world she traces back to childhood.“So much of how I make my art and my ideas is [driven by being] very curious and interested and I enjoy it so much. And it still feels like a privilege to be able to engage with it all.”Passage: The Art of Atong Atem is at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from October 30 to June 14. On Country: Photography from Australia is at the Immigration Museum until June 13.More from SpectrumHow cinema warned us about AIKyle MacLachlan’s journey into the darknessTroye Sivan takes stock