Artist Interview: Conversation with Alana Hunt

Alana Hunt works across visual art, literature, filmmaking, publishing, and social engagement. Based on Gadigal Country in Sydney, Hunt previously lived on Miriwoong and Gija Countries inthe East Kimberley region. Her practice is deeply personal, localised and self-reflective, examining housing precarity, memory, movement and the discreet everyday mechanisms of colonial violence through a non-Indigenous lens.

Hunt’s body of work includes a Super 8mm film and suite of polaroid photographs, with each work confronting the ‘deceptively simple’ desire for home. Hunt critically reflects on this universal need and the corresponding settler-colonial reality of non-Indigenous life on stolen land.

This interview between Alana Hunt and Sharon Mee, MAMA Registrar, occurred in July 2026.

Your works in this exhibition all speak about home but also housing precarity and its connections to colonial violence. In what ways has housing precarity informed your practice?

Housing precarity has shaped my life. So has colonialism. And my life, and the relationships within it, always shape my work.

I lived for 12 years on Gija and Miriwoong Countries in the northwest of Western Australia. It is these relationships – with places and people – that had a huge impact on how I understand the world I am in. But I only started to make work on Miriwoong Country after about 7 or 8 years of living up there. Working slowly, letting things brew is really important for me. Gradually, over that period of time, there were things that felt necessary to say, and I developed a personal approach to making work as a non-Indigenous person on unceded land that I felt comfortable with, (to a degree).

Thinking about power, privilege and complicity, my work has examined the discreet, everyday violences of non-Indigenous life on Miriwoong Country, through things like tourism and leisure, development, legislation, and most recently home.

In 2023, I moved to Gadigal Nura Sydney after being away for 15 years. This thread of thinking and working in critical and self-reflective ways about non-Indigenous life on stolen Aboriginal land is still a constant, but it is now finding shape in the urban and suburban spaces of settler-colonialism, where my needs as an adult are converging with memories of childhood, and colonialism and the housing crisis are smashing up against each other. You can see this in the works currently at MAMA – through my film the deceptively simple need for a home (on other people’s land) and the photo series When We Win Lotto. / Nice Car. Can’t Sleep In It.

There is a dry wit to your interventions into the settler-colonial structures of Australia. How do you use wit to situate your work within the tensions of a need for home and a colonialism that pervades everyday life?

In part that dry wit comes from my mother; she’s got a good sense of humour. And obviously I do too (jokes). But it also stems from the absurdities that I see in the world around us – the absurdities and fragilities of colonialism and modern nation states, of wealth accumulation and inequality, of how we comfortably live alongside profound injustice. The kind of dreams and aspirations that underpin our times are pretty wild when you take a step back. This current runs through my work in Australia and my work in Kashmir, which took root in 2009 in large part as a response to the absurdity of the state’s violence in Kashmir and the absurdity of the invisibility of that violence within India. Similarly, my work in Australia tries to make the purposely obscured, things rendered invisible, more visible and less obscure. And humour and wit become paths for that, but so does working with specificity, detail and precision.

How does your work in this exhibition connect the past to the present, whether through your use of mediums or through a serialisation within these mediums?

Accumulation is something that rings more true to me in relation to these works than serialisation. The cars accumulate, the houses accumulate, and so do memories, sentiments, feelings and evidence.

I do use analogue forms – from 35mm still photography, through to Super 8mm film and polaroids … this stems from an aesthetic affinity with these mediums, but more directly from something that happened in 2018 when the Kununurra Historical Society refused to give me permission to reproduce a photograph from their archive for an exhibition with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on the basis that I was making a “myth out of history”. They seemed to hold a much more nationalistic view of the past than I do; it felt like the past was something in their mind to be protected, whereas I wanted to unravel it. Despite this roadblock, I soon realised I could reshoot the archival images from the 1960s and 70s in the same locations by using film, and I have worked almost exclusively with film ever since. Conceptually analogue forms of film have become a medium that I can draw on to build a sense of continuity between the past and the present, as I try to illustrate colonialism as a continuum, not as some past historical event but as a structure we are all wrapped up in right now. So, the past and present slip and slide around each other in my work, materially and conceptually.

Alana Hunt is a finalist of the 2026 National Photography Prize, presented by the MAMA Art Foundation.

On until 22 November 2026

Photography by Jeremy Weihrauch