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Northern Centre for Contemporary Art

Name: Northern Centre for Contemporary Art
Address: 3 Vimy Lane, Parap, NT, 0820, AU
Telephone: +61889815368
Rating: 5

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Now showing: IncarcerNation, 5 August - 26 September 2026
Gallery hours: Wednesday - Friday, 10am - 4pm | Saturday, 8am - 2pm
(1)

09/10/2026

Thank you to everyone who gathered at NCCA for the opening of ‘We need to talk about the stalker’ — a courageous new body of work by Therese Ritchie.

Our thanks to Sam Bowden for opening the exhibition.

This breathtaking show runs until 14 November.

Curated by

📸 Paz Tassone

03/10/2026

IncarcerNation may have closed, but the conversation keeps going.

One of the most talked-about works in the show was Georgie Mattingley’s The New World (2021). In this three-channel video installation, staff undergo training in a dystopian gated institution — a sinister-kitsch world of power, punishment and feeling. The Mparntwe/Alice Springs-based artist made the film after a period working inside a high-security prison, using an imagined new world to hold the most tormenting and most human moments she witnessed there.

Hanging in the same space is her hand-tinted black-and-white photograph of Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in a state of neglect.

1.
Georgie Mattingley, The New World, 2021 Three-channel video, 23 minutes

2.
Georgie Mattingley, Once Upon a Time, 2024 Oil on silver gelatin print, epoxy resin frame

Images courtesy of the artist GEORGIE MATTINGLEY Nicholas Gouldhurst & jackington

23/09/2026

IncarcerNation closes this Saturday 2pm

Jack Green (born 1953)

1.
Boomerang story 1
acrylic on linen
36 x 36 cm

This painting is about Alex Doomadgee. Alex is a Waanyi fella. He was travelling on a Qantas plane and carrying two boomerangs. They wouldn’t let Alex on the plane with his boomerangs. Crazy really. They weren’t fightin’ boomerangs, but ceremonial boomerangs. You can tell ceremonial boomerangs as they are small and the edges aren’t sharp. We use them like a musical instrument to sing with. In this painting you can see the two big fighting boomerangs above the plane. They’d let fella on the plane carrying a guitar, but not an Aboriginal fella with his ceremonial boomerangs. Alex tried to explain the difference but they didn’t listen and took them from him. The story hit the media and this painting tells the story how we see it.

The funny things is the Qantas planes carry a Kangaroo symbol on their tail. The Kangaroo, he’s in our songs and ceremonies. We proud he spoke up, that’s why I painted him riding a kangaroo on the plane, holding the boomerangs and an Aboriginal flag. He’s flying over his country and all his family down at Dry Creek and Fish River are with him holding their ceremonial boomerangs and singing with him. Just a shame he couldn’t just ride the kangaroo through the sky as they’d both be singing to the clap of the boomerangs. — Jack Green

2.
Unlicensed, Unregistered, Prison, 2016
acrylic on linen
46 x 56 cm

Our motorcars take a hammering on the dirt roads and getting them fixed-up costs a big mob of money. Its big mob of money to get the motorcar registered too; money us Aboriginal people just don’t have. On top of this a lot of people don’t have a licence, it’s just too hard to get a licence in remote places. But we gotta travel for work, ceremony, for funerals, health and visiting family. This painting shows everyday life, how the police stop all us mob in our old motorcars trying to get in to town. They stop us and next thing you find yourself in a cage or might even be prison. — Jack Green

📸: 1-3 Nicholas Gouldhurst

19/09/2026

Billiamook (Gapal) worked as a multi-lingual interpreter for amateur photographer Paul Foelsche. He was locked up on minor charges through the 1880s. Larrakia artist and anthropologist Gary Lee has championed Gapal’s life and art, and has continued to retrieve ancestors from colonial archives, as in his splendid gold-leaf embossed tribute to ‘Gapal’ (2026).  Cutting to recent times, is Gary Lee’s work ‘Sad Buddha’ (2016). In 2016, the image of a young inmate, Dylan Voller, restrained in a chair and wearing a spit hood was aired on ABC Australia’s Shame. The kids in Don Dale Youth Detention Centre had been held in substandard conditions. The solitary confinement cells were the worst. Lee’s photograph of a young man protectively crouching as if to ward off an assailant, is a reminder of the constant threat of such structural imbalances.

We are grateful to Maurice O’Riordan for his assistance in cataloguing these works

📸: 1-2 Nicholas Gouldhurst 3: jackington
 IncarcerNation continues at NCCA until 26 September  ‘Gapal’, gold foil on digital print on Ilford cotton rag paper, 31.4 x 25 cm
‘Sad Buddha’, digital print, 42 x 50 cm

18/09/2026

Since the Royal Commission’s findings in 1991, there have been more than 630 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody nationwide.

Chips Mackinolty’s ‘Kumanjayi’ (2020) is a cry for those who have died in detention: repeated red stamps of the word ‘Kumanjayi’ — a substitute name used out of respect in Warlpiri after a person passes away — framed against a vast dark prison wall.

With all but two Australian jurisdictions still refusing to stop the imprisonment of children as young as 10, his banner ‘Kids on Country, Not in Custody’ (2020) extends that response nationally.

We are grateful for Bernadette Ryan for assistance in cataloguing these works.

The show continues at NCCA until 26 September.

Chips Mackinolty
‘Kids on Country, Not in Custody’, 2020, digital print on vinyl banner, 94 x 300 cm

‘Kumanjayi’, 2020, Ilford Galerie Prestige Cotton Rag Smooth 300gsm, 50 x 80 cm

📸: Nicholas Gouldhurst

16/09/2026

Archie Moore’s ‘Cairns’ (2025) comprises two towering ‘classical’ columns built from old volumes of Hansard — one for the House of Representatives, one for the Senate. Each bound volume records elected officials deploying rhetoric and procedure over lives far removed from their own, in debates followed by inertia and silence.

‘Cairns’ is showing in IncarcerNation at NCCA until 26 September.

Artwork courtesy of Archie Moore (archie moore kith and kin) and The Commercial (The Commercial). We are grateful to Amanda Rowell, elliebuttrose, jennakate and Jaimee Edwards for their curatorial and administrative support.

We acknowledge our amazing patrons Biddy van Aanholt , Chris Van Aanholt and .george (Aus Communities Foundation), whose generous financial support made the delivery and inclusion of this work possible.

Archie Moore, Cairns, 2025, found hardcover books (Hansard volumes, House of Representatives; Hansard volumes, Senate), installation dimensions variable (installation views). IncarcerNation at Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA), 2026 in collaboration with The Cross Art Projects

Image credits: 1-3 jackington 4-7 Nicholas Gouldhurst

04/09/2026

The first and last voices you will hear when entering and exiting IncarcerNation are those of First Nations kids who have spent time in detention centres.

Code Black/Riot exposes how youth detention systems target and violate the human rights of First Nations children in Australia. Taking its name from the language used within these institutions, the work presents interviews with children and staff, interspersed with film taken of the subjects at play, revealing the violence inherent in a system that works to deprive children of a future.

The crisis of mass incarceration of First Nations youth in Australia is an issue that demands not only national attention, but also collective action.

Also part of the Code Black/Riot project is an original text from Behrouz Boochani in which the writer reflects on his lived experience inside an Australian immigration detention centre on Manus Island and the parallels he sees with the system of First Nations youth detention.

NCCA is grateful to our lenders for allowing us to exhibit this work. Courtesy of the artists, Biennale of Sydney, Buxton Contemporary and Milani Gallery

Curated by Djon Mundine OAM, Don Christophersen, Jo Holder (The Cross Art Projects) and Petrit Abazi - IncarcerNation runs until 26 September

Hoda Afshar هدا افشار
Vernon Ah Kee
Behrouz Boochaniبهروز بوچانی

Code Black/Riot, 2025
Four-channel digital video installation, colour, sound
33 mins 
📸: 1-3 Nicholas Gouldhurst ; 4-6 jackington

25/08/2026

✨2026 MEMBERS EXHIBITION - ENTRIES NOW OPEN✨

This year’s theme is (IN)FINITE.

Time doesn’t move in straight lines. It rushes, stalls, and loops back on itself and we measure it in numbers, as if it were fixed. But not all infinities are equal in size.

This year we invite NCCA artist members to explore how we hold, shape, and are shaped by time.

Forms available via our bio, website, newsletter, online and printable.

Entries close Monday 16 November, 5pm.

30/05/2026

Street Art Group Show (a selection of works), 2011

At the front desk and entryway of the gallery, you’ll find a selection of plywood cutouts by Crabs and Hemi — two influential writers in Darwin’s local scene. These works were included in a group exhibition curated by Carol Phayer at Chan Contemporary Art Space in 2011.

Phayer played a key role in shaping Darwin’s street art landscape. She helped establish legal walls across the city, pushed for the dismantling of the Graffiti Task Force, and advocated for more sanctioned spaces for writers. She also maintained a database of all legal painting sites in Darwin — writers were given a form to carry so that, if questioned by police, they could present it and be referred directly to Phayer.

Crabs (born 1978)
Hemi (born 1979)
Street Art Group Show (a selection of works), 2011
Aerosol on MDF board
Dimensions variable

Photography:

Address

3 Vimy Lane
Parap, NT
0820

Opening Hours

Wednesday	10am - 4pm
Thursday	10am - 4pm
Friday	10am - 4pm
Saturday	8am - 2pm

Telephone

+61889815368

Website

http://nccart.com.au/

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