Tracing the Seven Sisters across land and time

Across the immense deserts of occidental and cardinal Australia, the onshore itself tells stories. For thousands of years, the First Nations radical — the archetypal custodians of the continent — person carried knowledge, culture, and contented done song, dance, and art.  

Until March 15, 2026, Delhi volition go portion of that storytelling tradition. The Humayun’s Tomb World Heritage Site Museum is hosting Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, a multi-sensory accumulation jointly organised by the National Museum of Australia (NMA) and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA). It marks the archetypal large NMA accumulation to circuit India, a travel that traverses godforsaken landscapes, ancestral lands, and star-lit skies.

Through astir 300 works, including paintings, sculptures, soundscapes, photography, and multimedia installations, visitors are invited to travel the travel of the Seven Sisters. These ancestral women are pursued by a shape-shifting sorcerer, whose formation carved mountains, waterholes, and constellations into the Australian landscape.

“Songlines are important expressions of culture, capturing rules of life, law, spirituality, and connection,” explains Jilda Andrews, lawman director, First Nations, NMA. “To convey this concept, indigenous artistes and cognition holders bring unneurotic melodramatic and ocular artforms, song, and dance, making the connection dynamic and compelling. Visitors summation penetration into worlds vastly antithetic from their own.”

Roobina Karode, manager and main curator astatine KNMA, adds, “It mirrors the taste cloth of storytelling, song, dance, and ancestral cognition woven into the scenery and guided by customary laws, overmuch similar our ain people and oral traditions.”

Traversing godforsaken lands

Songlines traces the journeys of the Seven Sisters crossed 3 indigenous lands: the APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) radical successful the cardinal deserts, the Ngaanyatjarra radical successful the West, and the Martu radical successful the northwest of Australia. Delhi is the exhibition’s 5th planetary stop, aft tours successful the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Finland.

“The Seven Sisters communicative is fundamentally an look of Tjukurrpa,” explains Jilda. “It reveals an interconnected web of relationships that spans this extended portion and illustrates the ways radical are embedded wrong these landscapes.”

The communicative is multi-layered; arsenic individuals summation seniority and experience, caller dimensions of complexity and meaning emerge. “In galore ways, the accumulation is much than a amusement for audiences — it is simply a ceremonial speech with everyone who enters the space. The preparation, taste obligations, and attraction progressive are immense,” Jilda adds.

A multisensory experience

Unlike accepted creation exhibitions, Songlinesis arsenic overmuch astir geography arsenic it is astir imagery. The amusement features the world’s highest-resolution travelling DomeLab, immersing visitors successful images of Seven Sisters stone creation from the distant Cave Hill tract successful South Australia. Animated artworks hint the Orion constellation and the Pleiades prima cluster, creating a consciousness of question crossed entity and land.

Cultural ambassadors from distant godforsaken communities person travelled to Delhi to execute inma, ceremonial dances that bring the communicative to life. The operation of painting, sculpture, multimedia, sound, and question allows visitors unfamiliar with Aboriginal cosmologies to acquisition the story’s affectional and spiritual resonance.

Roobina notes, “Even if visitors aren’t acquainted with First Nations cosmologies, they tin link with ancestral wisdom, ineffable landscapes, and storytelling traditions.”

“We anticipation that planetary audiences volition glimpse the dynamism of First Nations Australia,” says Jilda. “Museums contiguous clasp the powerfulness to cultivate awe and inspiration successful young people.”

For KNMA, presenting Songlines is besides an accidental to foster cross-cultural dialogue. “Both India and Australia inherit past civilisations grounded successful spiritual relationships with the land,” Roobina observes. “This accumulation becomes a bridge, inviting reflection connected heritage, continuity, and the powerfulness of surviving histories.”

The accumulation is connected presumption astatine Humayun World Heritage Site Museum, Nizamuddin, Sunder Nursery, New Delhi, from 10am to 9pm (last introduction astatine 8pm). The depository is closed connected Monday and nationalist holidays. The summons terms is ₹50