First Nations artists often work outside Western disciplines of knowledge and artistic practice, unsettling ideas of authority and systems that seek to categorise, contain, and render the world fully knowable. Through their practices, these artists question dominant structures and disrupt the notion that settler-colonial histories and processes can ever be complete. The term ‘un-discipline’ refers to acts of methodological refusal and creative sovereignty — ways of knowing, making, and sharing knowledge that resist imposed boundaries, challenge colonial frameworks, and affirm the continuity and authority of First Nations cultures, histories, and relationships to Country.
Un-discipline considers forms of change that do not rely on force but instead unsettle prevailing regimes of classification and control. It interrogates the division of land into property, knowledge into discrete fields, culture into objects, and people into fixed identities of race, gender, and citizenship.
To 'un-discipline' is not simply to reject order. Rather, it moves beyond the assumption that order must be singular, hierarchical, or externally imposed. It makes space for ways of knowing and being that are relational, embodied, situated, cyclical, and often ephemeral, rather than extractive, taxonomic, or governed through surveillance and control. In this sense, un-disciplining is not chaos; it is an openness to that which cannot be fully classified, contained, or governed.
Drawn from the FUMA collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, the works in this exhibition embody ideas of un-disciplining through their resistance to colonial systems that have sought to define, contain, and interpret First Nations knowledges and cultures. Moving across art, story, language, memory, archive, and activism, these works defy fixed categories, dominant narratives, and conventional distinctions between disciplines, methods, and materials. Through acts of reclamation, disruption, and renewal, they assert creative sovereignty over how knowledge is held, transmitted, and shared.
