Dia and MCA Australia Announce Two-Part d harding Exhibition

New York's Dia Art Foundation will co-present a two-part exhibition of work by the Indigenous Australian artist d harding, split between Dia Chelsea and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) in Sydney. The New York component opens in February; the Sydney part follows in March. Both run into August of next year.

The partnership puts harding on two continents at once. It also hands the artist a milestone: the MCA Australia show will be harding's first museum survey.

Dia curator Jordan Carter framed the project around a single idea. "A through line in harding's practice is the concept of transfer—a consideration of how histories are carried through materials, techniques, and places, transporting ancestral knowledge into dialogue with the spaces in which their work is encountered," Carter said in a statement. "Presented in parallel at two institutions, bridging Australia and the U.S., this two-part exhibition reveals the iterative logic, conceptual depth, and cultural resonance of harding's practice."

Where did the new work come from?

For the Dia show, harding drew on site visits to the foundation's Land art holdings (large-scale earthworks installed in remote American landscapes) in the American West. Those holdings include Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, and Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels. harding paired those visits with trips to rock-art galleries on their ancestral Country in Central Queensland.

That pairing produced a new commission: a series of "transfer paintings." The process has a specific chain. harding inherited canvases from fellow artist Gordon Bennett, processed them with earthen materials, and transferred them onto 60 panels. Each panel evokes a location carrying a significant sense of place.

What does the Sydney survey cover?

The MCA Australia exhibition will be organized around four themes: inheritance, visitation, embodiment, and continuity. It will include an expansion of harding's "wall composition" (a work applied directly to gallery walls rather than hung on them), titled Know them in correct judgement (2026). The artist made it in collaboration with extended family members, in mind of their inheritance of rock-art.

MCA Australia senior curator Anneke Jaspers put harding's stakes plainly. "Their work powerfully recalibrates dominant notions of the sovereign, the center, and the canon from an Aboriginal perspective," Jaspers said.

What does this change for audiences? For New York viewers, it's a rare chance to see an Aboriginal Australian practice built in direct response to American Land art monuments. For Sydney, it formalizes harding's career with a first survey, timed to run in parallel with the U.S. show through August 2026.