019 018 01 Stephen Gilchrist Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia 01 Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Obed Raggett, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, and Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Honey Ant Mural, Papunya, 1971. For Indigenous Australians, the Dreaming provides a way to understand and interact with the past, present, and future. It is an archive of narratives that tells how the world was created by Ancestral Beings. The Dreaming can refer to these narratives, to the sacred sites the ancestors created through their actions, and to the laws they handed down. For Indigenous people, the earth, sea, and sky are libraries of knowledge through which one encounters traces of the Ancestral Beings, who emerged from, roamed, and sometimes metamorphosed into bodies of water, planetary systems, and features of the landscape. These sites are vested with spiritual power, making them places of profound commu- nion, as well as mnemonic aids. For Indigenous people, the Dreaming does not merely preserve the past. Rather, it speaks of eternal becoming. It is the totality of Indigenous knowledge and its future potential, made alive through both its immediate and continuing transmission. Gesturing insistently toward the future, the Dreaming pushes ancestral memory into the present. As Pitjantjatjara artist Tommy Watson eloquently says about the imperatives of cultural art production, “Our paintings are our memories for the future relatives.” 1 In narratives that are spoken, danced, sung, painted, and safeguarded across generations, the Dreaming is made and remade as eternally present. The past is not inaccessible to Indigenous people. It is instead part of a cyclical and circular order. Indigenous conceptions of time rely on active encounters with both the ancestral and natural worlds, and these dynamic relationships fnd expression in artistic production. Through this process, important creation narratives are reconstituted and relived through ceremonial performances and visual art. These activities ensure the well-being of the ancestors, the features of the landscape that they created and then became, and the people who are forever connected to each. In “The Dreaming” (1953), Australian anthropologist William Stanner wrote, “One cannot ‘fx’ the Dreaming in time; it was, and is, everywhen.” 2 This poetic neologism was not necessarily offered to suggest a synonym for the Dreaming, but rather to provide that concept with nuance. Nonetheless, the term captures something elusive about the Dreaming’s approach to time — its singularity, sequentiality, and connectivity. For this reason, the elastic paradigm of “the Everywhen” is used in this exhibition to explore the ways that Indigenous Australians conceptualize, mark, and manipulate time. Transformation In 1971–72, a group of senior men began painting in the community of Papunya, located 240 kilometers (150 miles) northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. The new has no meaning without the old, and the radical newness of painting from Papunya was understood because of its departure from ceremonial performances and narrative elabo- rations. On an outside wall of the Papunya Special School, the men collaborated on