17 November 2025
Groundbreaking First Nations exhibition showcases epic creation story
The National Museum of Australia in partnership with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, will open the acclaimed First Nations creation saga Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters at the Humayun's Tomb World Heritage Site Museum in New Delhi, India, on 22 November 2025.
The first major National Museum of Australia exhibition to tour India, Songlines features a dramatic chase across the Australian deserts and showcases the ways that ancient knowledge, story, song, dance, culture, and protocols are woven into the landscape and are grounded by tjukurrpa – Aboriginal Law.
The exhibition in New Delhi will be the fifth international destination for Songlines, which debuted in Canberra in 2017 and has since toured to the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Finland.
A world first in scale and complexity, this epic exhibition highlights five sections of the Indigenous Western and Central Desert songlines through nearly 300 paintings and objects, song, dance, photography and multimedia, to narrate the story of the Seven Sisters, as they flee along Ancestral routes and across deserts, pursued relentlessly by a sorcerer.
National Museum of Australia Director Katherine McMahon said she is proud to take such a culturally significant exhibition to India. ‘After its successful tour of Europe, we are delighted to bring Australia’s cultural treasures closer to home, and to India where ancient connections are deeply shared.
‘First Nations Australians have sustained the world’s oldest living culture for more than 65,000 years, and Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is a powerful and moving example of the Museum’s decades-long collaboration with Indigenous communities. We are proud to play our part in taking a First Nations exhibition of this scale and significance to global audiences,’ said Ms McMahon.
Kiran Nadar, Founder and Chairperson, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, said ‘The opening of the Songlines exhibition in India marks a significant milestone in our ongoing commitment to cross-cultural dialogue and public engagement with art. Developed by the National Museum of Australia, this expansive and immersive presentation brings to life the powerful narratives of the Seven Sisters Songline – an epic story deeply rooted in Indigenous Australian culture. By merging ancient storytelling traditions with cutting-edge technology, the exhibition invites audiences in India to experience a journey that transcends geography and time. Through collaborations like these, we aim to deepen understanding and appreciation of shared human heritage, celebrating the timeless wisdom of communities and their connection to the land.’
Australian High Commissioner to India, Phillip Green OAM, said the stories of First Nations Australians are central to Australia’s modern, diverse and rich heritage.
‘The Australian Government is committed to elevating First Nations voices and providing a platform to share their culture, history and traditions with international audiences.
‘As the relationship between Australia and India continues to grow, we seek to deepen our understanding of one another. Through the acclaimed Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, Indian audiences will be immersed in a vibrant showcase of Australia’s First Nations art and culture. The Seven Sisters Songline is an epic narrative of the Australian continent, passed down through generations and shared through stories and songs by Australia’s traditional custodians.
'This exhibition is a tangible example of the growing artistic and cultural ties between Australia and India. I am pleased this exhibition has been brought to India in partnership with two esteemed institutions – the National Museum of Australia and New Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.'
National Museum of Australia Deputy Director First Nations, Dr Jilda Andrews, said Songlines is an invitation to share in and celebrate the importance of culture for the future.
‘The culturally rich landscape of India offers a unique opportunity to share our ancient knowledge and practices in a new contemporary context,’ said Dr Andrews. ‘Songlines are vast and characterise Indigenous life on the Australian continent as grounded, connected and richly expressive – songlines are the connective threads that vein our Country,’ she said.
‘Songlines are epic stories that are imprinted across the landscape through creeks, waterholes, rocks, caves, trees and mountains. They are mirrored in the constellations visible in the night’s sky and they are recalled through story, song, dance, ceremony and cultural practice,’ said Dr Andrews.
‘This dialogue finds expression in marvellous and creative ways and is celebrated throughout the exhibition,’ said Dr Andrews.
Seven years in the making, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is an Australian Aboriginal saga that portrays the dramatic story of creation, desire, flight and survival through the journey of female Ancestral beings pursued by a powerful, shape-shifting male figure.
By following the exhibition’s trail of magnificent art and installations that function as portals to place, visitors effectively ‘walk’ the songlines. These are both complex spiritual pathways and vehicles for naming and locating waterholes and food sources critical for survival in the desert.
The exhibition features the world’s highest resolution travelling DomeLab, which immerses visitors in images of Seven Sisters rock art from the remote Cave Hill site in South Australia, animated art works, and the transit of the Orion constellation and the Pleiades star cluster. Standing beneath the 7-metre-wide domed ceiling, visitors are transported to Seven Sisters sites on the songlines.
Background
The project that led to the Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters exhibition resulted from an urgent plea by Aṉangu traditional custodians of Australia’s Central Western Desert, ‘to help put the songlines back together as they were getting all broken up.’ This initiative by the Aṉangu people was to not only preserve the Seven Sisters knowledge for future generations but also to engage all peoples in this invaluable piece of world heritage.
Songlines traverses three Indigenous lands: those of the APY (Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) people through the central deserts, the Ngaanyatjarra people to the west of Australia and the Martu people in the north-west of Australia.
Since 2010, National Museum of Australia curators, led by an Indigenous Community Curatorium of elders and knowledge holders, have gone back to Country to track the Seven Sisters songlines. Younger people are also now joining the curatorium as part of the intended cross-generational transfer of knowledge.
Along the journey, Indigenous cultural custodians recorded their knowledge of the Seven Sisters in art works, stories, and film, which have become part of the National Museum of Australia’s National Historical Collection.
All research material collected for this project has been deposited in the Aboriginal-managed digital archive Aṟa Irititja, in Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory.
The original exhibition was led by senior curator Margo Ngawa Neale.
As the exhibition tours the world, the project continues to be led and guided by community Cultural Ambassadors.
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters received the prestigious Best in Show award at the 2018 Australian Museums and Galleries National Awards.
After opening in 2017 at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, Songlines travelled to the Western Australian Museum, Perth, in 2020–21 and then internationally to The Box in Plymouth, England (as part of the UK/Australia Season 2021–22, a joint initiative by the British Council and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, in 2022, Musée du quai Branly, Paris, in 2023 and Museokeskus Vapriikki, Finland, in 2024–25.
The exhibition will be on display at Humayun’s Tomb World Heritage Site Museum from 22 November 2025 to 1 March 2026.
Media contacts:
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art – Amrita Kapoor +91 9818058964 or amrita.kapoor@knma.org
National Museum of Australia – Diana Streak +61 409 888 976 or media@nma.gov.au
About Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA)
Established through the initiative of avid art collector Kiran Nadar, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) opened to the public in January 2010 as India’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art from the subcontinent. KNMA is a non-commercial, not-for-profit institution supported by the Shiv Nadar Foundation. It seeks to foster a dynamic relationship between art and culture through its exhibitions, publications, educational initiatives, and public programs. Committed to institutional collaborations and artist support networks, KNMA actively engages with diverse audiences through its wide-ranging programming.
The museum’s ever-expanding collection of over 15,000 artworks from South Asia features some of the most significant modernist and contemporary works. Now broadening its scope to include classical, folk and tribal art, the collection spans historical trajectories from the 3rd century BCE to 20th-century Indian art, alongside the experimental practices of young contemporaries.
KNMA is set to evolve into a landmark cultural destination with a new location, an expansive 100,000-square-metre (over 1 million square feet) architectural marvel, near the Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi. It will feature multiple exhibition spaces, a performance arts centre, an education block, an archive centre, a library, restaurants, and a members’ room. Strengthening its role as a cultural epicentre, this expansion will further KNMA’s mission to be a vibrant hub for visual and performing arts, fostering artistic innovation and cultural dialogue.