Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre

Tennant Creek, Australia

Exhibition Design. Graphic Design. Content Development. Community Consultation. Production. Installation.

Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre is located on Warumungu land, and home to the Nyinkka (the spikytailed goanna), a sacred and powerful ancestral being and Wirnkarra.

FRD has completed Stage 2 (production, construction and installation) of Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre, including a new gallery, exhibition space. It is a community hub, preserving language and cultural practice, cross-generational learning and showcasing Warumungu history. Visitors are immersed in the story of this place, the culture and the deep, enduring connection to Manu (Country).

The design was guided throughout by the Warumungu Community, incorporating into the exhibition a strong sense of being on Country and connecting to the footsteps of their ancestors who have always walked here.

Stage 1 of the project (community consultation, content curation, exhibition design and multimedia production) to was undertaken from 2019-2024.

See Nyinkka Nyunyu stage 1

The design pairs new digital technologies with the telling of old stories, songs and cultural knowledge to create exhibition spaces that are sensory, emotional, immersive and intimate. It engages the imagination, and takes visitors back to before the town of Tennant Creek, to when the Nyinkka forged tracks through the landscape and had relationships with other ancestral beings. Visitors are surrounded in Warumungu language and knowledge, with a soundscape of songs and nature recorded on Country.

Nyinkka Nyunyu acts as a safe space on Country for physical objects to be returned, but also a place to preserve stories, oral histories and cultural knowledge that is in danger of being lost. Crossing the threshold into the Keeping Place (Wurrmulalkki), you enter a space where the walls are alive with objects, surrounded by the richness of culture, of the Old People and their songlines, and by Warumungu voice, the stories that are written in the landscape and in time.

Warumungu voice was a design driver for the exhibition spaces, both visually, with the dominant use of Apparr (language) graphics and through digital media with the words from the storytelling circle media piece becoming a soundscape for the exhibition.