In the early morning at Cooya Beach – Kuyu Kuyu – north of Port Douglas, the tide was still going out as we began walking. The Traditional Custodians of the Kuku Yalanji people led us across the mudflats, mangroves and beach, showing us bush foods and medicines and teaching spear-throwing and hunting as living skills, not demonstrations. I’m proud to say the mudcrab I speared, much to my own surprise, is proof of it. It was the opening morning of CIAF’s On Country VIP Program, hosted by Girramay/Yidinji/Kuku-Yalanji artist Tony Albert, and it set the tone for everything that followed. I was there for the first time, by invitation, as part of the Queensland Indigenous Art Delegation — a program run by Trade and Investment Queensland with Arts Queensland and CIAF to help institutions build real, long-term relationships with Art Centres, not just buy from them.

Image Courtesy of Vanessa Merlino

CIAF’s 2026 theme, Reclamation & Regeneration, was present everywhere, not only in how the fair was programmed but also in how strong, varied and fresh the work itself felt. Reclamation, as CIAF Artistic Director Teho Ropeyarn describes it, is an act of resurgence: a return to Country, to memory, to knowledge colonisation worked to disrupt. Regeneration is what that knowledge becomes once it’s carried forward — not preserved as a relic, but alive and changing in the next generation’s hands. We felt this most directly at the Art Fair Showcase preview, where artists spoke about their own work and practices, less a preview, more a chance to genuinely listen.

Tony Albert, our host, was also the curator of the recent After the Rain, the 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial. Over a long lunch, he unpacked the question: what does it mean to curate as an artist? Project by project, he took us behind the scenes and through the many conversations, collaborations, and cultural responsibilities of his role as Artistic Director, while maintaining his own mark as an artist. That same generosity ran throughout the week, in his hosting of the entire On Country programme, and in his standing as one of Queensland’s great champions of Indigenous art and the artists who make it. What stayed with me most was how he talked about curatorial responsibility — something he said he relearns with every project, in direct conversation with the artists and communities involved. For a gallery working with living, practising artists day to day, that’s worth sitting with: the responsibility is the artist’s first, and everyone else is there to support it, not to stand beside it as an equal.

Then, at the CIAF Art Awards, Keith Wikmunea — of Wik and Kugu Arts Centre in Aurukun — took out the newly combined 3D Design, Sculpture & Innovation Award for his blue tree, Yeel | Corella. He’s no newcomer: he won the $100,000 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award back in 2023, and has just been named a finalist in this year’s Wynne Prize too.

Keith Wikmunea | Theewith yot.a! 2024 | natural earth pigments with synthetic binders on carved milkwood
© Keith Wikmunea c/o Wik & Kugu Art Centre, 2024

The Wik region of Cape York once again shone at the Cairns Art Gallery preview of Brush: Women Painters, curated by Shonae Hobson – a survey of women painters from Cape York and the Gulf of Carpentaria, including Kugu-Uwanh artist Mavis Ngallametta and Wik-Mungkan artist Janet Koongotema. One of the most special projects I have had the honour to work on was Koongotema’s solo exhibition, Archer River Country, at the Melbourne Art Fair earlier this year. Her glorious painting, Moun.aw – Archer River story place (2024), was chosen as the show’s lead image and featured everywhere across Cairns. 

Brush: Women Painters. Installation Views: Courtesy of Cairns Art Gallery
© Janet Koongotema c/o Wik & Kugu Art Centre, 2026

The week wrapped up at The Mill in Stratford, where CIAF’s fashion program showcased twenty-five designers, including three from Taiwan, and Korina Emmerich and Liana Shewey of Relative Arts, New York. The two shows centred on the theme of Reclamation and Regeneration, with designers addressing climate resilience, connection to Country, and personal healing, and on the idea that a garment carries lineage and responsibility, not just aesthetics.

CIAF is set up so First Nations artists and communities keep hold of their own stories — Yarrabah artist Elverina Johnson put it plainly in her closing keynote: Reclamation and Regeneration means control over which stories get told, and by whom. That standard extends to the delegation itself. Trade and Investment Queensland describes its purpose, in part, as building genuine market access and relationships for Art Centres, not transactions. For a gallery attending as part of that delegation, the honest position is not to narrate anyone’s reclamation on their behalf, but to have witnessed it and to hold ourselves to that same standard of long-term, real partnership.

Vanessa Merlino

D Lan Galleries attended CIAF 2026 as part of the Queensland Indigenous Art Delegation, supported by Trade and Investment Queensland, Arts Queensland and the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair.