Tuan Andrew Nguyen: We Were Lost in Our Country

The word also signifies kinship with the lands, waters, and skies of the Great Sandy Desert, which the Aboriginal communities of the Walmajarri, Wangkajunga, Mangala, and Juwaliny language groups have stewarded for millennia. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film We Were Lost in Our Country explores how these communities established legal rights to their ancestral land by creating the monumental painting Ngurrara Canvas II in 1997.

Painted entirely from memory and intergenerational knowledge, Ngurrara Canvas II maps the environmental features of 29,000 square miles of the Great Sandy Desert. Created by 44 Ngurrara artists, it is more than a cartographic representation of territory. It was conceived and produced as evidence of Indigenous connections to Country, securing the land—and the spiritual worldview it embodies—for future generations.

Nguyen’s film brings together archival and new footage, including interviews with surviving map artists and younger community members who were raised outside of the desert, disconnected from Country. It meditates on dispossession and inherited trauma, as well as on ways of knowing and belonging. In We Were Lost in Our Country, Nguyen shows how collective memory heals and engenders solidarity and how storytelling and art making are forms of political resistance.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: We Were Lost in Our Country is organized by Irene Sunwoo, John H. Bryan Chair and Curator, Architecture and Design.