Cairns Indigenous Art Fair Dates: 9 – 12 July 2026
Onespace Booth: 25
Tanks Arts Centre – Tank 3 & Tank 4
Opening Night Preview: 4.00 pm – 10.00 pm Thursday 9 July | BUY TICKETS
This July and August, Onespace presents a dynamic program foregrounding leading First Nations artists across Cairns and Brisbane. The Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) will feature Brian Robinson and Sam Harrison on the Onespace booth. This year, Onespace launches two new print suites by Robinson: Abundance of Country and the Stargate series. CIAF coincides with Harrison’s appointment as the inaugural CIAF x Blaklash Resonance Commission recipient, with his exhibition Kin’O’Centrism presented at Cairns Art Gallery’s Court House Building.
Brian Robinson
This year, Brian Robinson’s exquisite series of prints, Abundance of Country and the Stargate series, will be on display at the Onespace CIAF booth. Abundance of Country is an extension of Robinson’s significant public sculpture, Floriate, that stands at the entrance of the newly opened Glasshouse Theatre at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC). Each print illustrates the significant flora that blooms across Queensland’s seven river systems that have both culturally and physically sustained First Nations peoples for tens of thousands of years.
For Robinson, the flowers that comprise Abundance of Country become “a meeting point: a mandala of Country, where knowledge is encoded through pattern, repetition, and rhythm. Surrounding it, fields of stars scatter across a dark expanse, while constellations trace ancestral pathways through the sky.”
If you miss out on CIAF this year, you’ll find Abundance of Country alongside new and unseen artworks by Robinson in the exhibition As Above, So Below, showing in the Onespace Main Gallery from 10 July – 15 August 2026.
Robinson eloquently writes that As Above, So Below brings “ancestral knowing into dialogue with contemporary visual language. Torres Strait cosmology is woven with the pixelated logic of Space Invaders, where descending digital forms hover between play, memory, and disruption. These invaders shift meaning—becoming spirits of a coded sky, or echoes of arrival, intrusion, and transformation.”
Sam Harrison
Sam Harrison, who holds cultural connections to the Kamilaroi and Wiradjuri peoples of Central New South Wales, has an exciting program ahead at CIAF 2026. As the recipient of the CIAF x Blaklash Resonance commission, Harrison will present Kin’O’Centrism at the Courthouse Gallery, Cairns, from 27 June to 22 August.
In Kin’O’Centrism, Harrison proposes an Indigenous cosmological model of kinship, where relations unfold across the human, animal, botanical, celestial, and spiritual worlds—and beyond. It is a model grounded in non-linear time; time is cyclic and immemorial. Kinship, then, is not something that simply happens across time, but deeply with, and within, time. Harrison foregrounds Indigenous understandings of time, where the past, present, and future ceaselessly commingle.
The apex to the exhibition is the Eclipse series (2026), an assemblage of tessellating lightboxes where scenes of secular and cultural life are rendered within cosmological cycles. This series articulates a universal Indigenous understanding of relationality and responsibility, where care for Community and Country is mutually realised.
At the Onespace CIAF booth, several light boxes by Harrison will accompany Brian Robinson’s Abundance of Country. The available artworks derive from the cosmological worldview of Kin’O’Centrism presented at the Courthouse Gallery.
Acknowledgements
Onespace acknowledges Mossenson Galleries as Brian Robinson’s representative gallery, excluding public art projects which are managed by Onespace.
Images: Michael Marzik. Louis Lim. Courtesy of the artists and Onespace.
