First Lights – Balarr Inyiny

About the artists

Jenna Lee

Jenna Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian ancestry. Using art to explore and celebrate her many overlapping identities, Lee works across sculpture, installation, and body adornment. She also works with moving images, photography and projection in the digital medium.

With a practice focused on materiality and ancestral material culture, Lee works with notions of the archive, histories of colonial collecting, and settler-colonial books and texts. Lee ritualistically analyses, deconstructs and reconstructs source material, language and books, transforming them into new forms of cultural beauty and pride, and presenting a tangibly translated book.

Driven to create work in which she, her family, and the broader mixed First Nations community see themselves represented, Lee builds on a foundation of her father’s teachings of culture and her mother’s teachings of papercraft.

Lee was honoured to be the recipient of several awards: the Wandjuk Marika 3D Memorial Award at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA); the Australia Council’s Dreaming Award; and, the Libris Artist Book Prize. She has been a finalist in national awards, including the prestigious John Fries Award for emerging and early career artists, the Footscray Art Prize, the National Works on Paper Prize, and the KWM Contemporary First Nations Art Award.

Represented by MARS Gallery in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia), Lee has exhibited in several national and international museums and galleries, including the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford UK, the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), the Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory, QUT Art Gallery, and Griffith University Art Gallery. Formally trained as a graphic designer, Lee has a Bachelor of Visual Communication Design, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Museum Studies.

Kuya James

Multi-faceted and iconically recognised producer Kuya James (aka James Mangohig) grew up in the tropical and diverse metropolis of Darwin; the capital of the Northern Territory on Larrakia land in Australia. The first-born son to a Filipino migrant father and an Australian born Dutch mother, James would earn his stage name early in life simply by being the eldest. “Kuya” in the national Filipino tongue means “older brother”. A term of endearment and respect that he would gain not only from his biological family, but from the families he has made within communities spanning music, dance, culture and theatre, locally in Darwin, nationally and internationally.

Combining his natural affinity for rhythm and melody with an obsessive passion of high-quality sonic experiences, Kuya James crafted his production talents over years of collaboration in bands and production duos; resulting in a large catalogue of songs and award nominations and wins. Creating a signature sound bookmarked by pulsating tribal beats, Asian samples, flipping vocals, synths and sub bass; Kuya James’ instrumentals alone challenge even the most well-built PA systems.