The National Gallery of Victoria is presenting the first major solo exhibition of Atong Atem, the South Sudanese artist based in Naarm Melbourne whose vivid photographic self-portraits explore identity, mythmaking and intergenerational storytelling. Passage: The Art of Atong Atem opens on 30 October at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, bringing together more than 65 works in the most comprehensive presentation of her practice to date. The show runs until 14 June 2027.

Atem is both subject and storyteller in her portraits, transforming herself through textiles, paint, costume and symbolic objects. Her own body becomes a vessel for exploring race, gender and colonialism, as well as the beauty and resilience of her Dinka Bor culture and of Melbourne's African diaspora. The exhibition is organised around ideas of movement and journeys, themes rooted in her own experience of migration: born in Ethiopia to South Sudanese parents, Atem and her family made their home in Australia in 1997.

The survey includes world-premiere and Australian-premiere works, alongside series shown in their entirety for the first time. Among the highlights is the Australian premiere of Scars and Constellations, a 2024 series commissioned by the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, which explores the relationship between sea, sky and the histories of colonial trade and navigation, with scarification, a Dinka Bor cultural practice, at its centre.

Atem has also made a new large-scale wall installation for the show, As Above, which weaves together Dinka dance, traditional beading and Catholic iconography with the stories held in the skies and constellations. Also on view for the first time in a major Australian institution is Banksia, a 2021 series made at the Immigration Museum that turns its lens on African, African American and Caribbean convicts and free settlers who arrived with the First Fleet, while Surat, from 2022, recreates portraits of relatives Atem knows only through family photographs.