Christopher Pease: Terra Nullius
Sovereignty, resilience, and enduring connection to Country.
Exhibition Dates: 29 May – 23 August 2026
Catalogue supporting the exhibition 'Christopher Pease: Terra Nullius', a major solo exhibition by leading Noongar artist (Minang/Wardandi/Bibbulmun) Christopher Pease proudly presented by John Curtin Gallery. Featuring significant loans from major public and private collections, alongside new large-scale works, Christopher Pease: Terra Nullius reveals Pease’s sustained interrogation of sovereignty, land, and power.
The exhibition title invokes the legal fiction of terra nullius – the doctrine used by British colonisers to claim Australia as “nobody’s land,” – denying the existence of Aboriginal societies with complex laws, cultures, and custodianship of Country. For Aboriginal Australians, terra nullius sanctioned dispossession, cultural erasure, and generations of structural injustice. Pease employs the term ironically, exposing its violence and absurdity through layere
