Daniel Browning
Verified- Editor, Indigenous Radio, ABC News (Australia)
- Host, The Art Show, ABC Radio National
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Articles by Daniel Browning
CJ Hendry and Ricky Swallow: two of Australia's biggest arts exports on ambition and success, plus Latai Taumoepeau's live art as protest - ABC listen
Three artists in their prime talk to The Art Show... CJ Hendry specialises in hyper-real paintings, but she’s just as comfortable with the art of the spectacle as she is creating the art itself - her recent showcase exhibition in NY got shut down because it drew too many people. Fellow expat Ricky Swallow has been taking LA by storm with his striking bronze sculptures, but is returning home for his first foray into public art.
Opinions of the UK general public and stroke survivors in using artificial intelligence and ‘opt-out’ models of consent in medical research: a qualitative study
Methods To ensure a representative sample, we used a mixed methods approach to triangulate data collection. These were an in-person/online (hybrid) semistructured focus group, an online questionnaire and one-to-one interviewing of inpatients at Derriford Hospital, UK. Data was collected between 1 January 2024 and 1 May 2025 and iteratively reviewed until the point of data saturation was reached. Prior to any of these three approaches, participants were provided with two documents.
Daniel Browning reviews ‘The Red House: Kumanjayi Walker and Zachary Rolfe - an Australian reckoning’ by Kate Wild
It is in places like Alice Springs and remote towns like Yuendumu that the fleshy, malignant knot in the corpus of the settler-colonial nation state becomes utterly, obscenely visible. If you’re drawn to these places, you will find that regardless of who you are, at some point you will have to sit in your discomfort. In that profound culture shock, you have to accept that you are a foreigner in what you might regard as your own country.
Emily Kam Kngwarray Defined What Aboriginal Art Could Be
The self-taught, octogenarian artist’s rise was meteoric, and so a narrative formed that was by turns mythological and frankly racist. It’s time to correct the record Most people I know would utter her name as if she were a global superstar. A singular name, like Madonna, that could, nevertheless, signify only one person: Emily. She would sign works in permanent black marker: Emlly. Not Emily, but Emlly – a phonetic spelling, the way she’d have pronounced it, with two syllables (Em-lee).
Del Kathryn Barton’s creative world-building project imagines empowered, spirited women
Del Kathryn Barton exorcised her rage in her critically acclaimed feature film Blaze, but its aftermath is grief. You wouldn't know it if you cast your eye around her Paddington studio: wide-eyed sylphs, sibyls and sages emerge from minutely detailed canvases where chequerboards, dots and strawberries are laden with new meaning. Much like a cinema auteur, DKB is engaged in a world-building project and it's a place that brims with female power and agency.
Drawing with sound underground: Jason Maling’s magnum opus Diagrammatica
Jason Maling works in the expanded field where — through the interface of technology, screens and a sound system — the sonic and the visual are conducted before a live audience. Diagrammatica was inspired by physics diagrams but it's grown into a beast: part drawing, part durational performance and part musical composition.
Thousands of Indigenous peoples were objectified in human zoos, including in Australia
WARNING: The following story contains information that may cause distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers, who are advised to exercise caution. The term says it all: human zoos. Strange as it may seem, human beings — largely Indigenous people from across the globe — were recruited to perform in ethnographic displays, also called human zoos, from the mid-19th century to the 1930s, mostly in Europe and the United States.
Thai-Australian artist Nathan Beard’s ironic take on museum artefacts - ABC listen
Recently on the show we met Filipino artist Pio Abad to hear about his Turner Prize nominated exhibition 'To Those Sitting in Darkness' which re-presented museum objects to reveal hidden histories and the deep legacies of colonialism. Thai-Australian multidisciplinary artist Nathan Beard takes a different, less didactic, approach but, like Pio Abad, is working with cultural objects that are largely unseen. In Beard's case, Buddha heads made for ritual use, squirrelled away in the British Museum.
Frank by name: Dale Frank on taxidermy and his greatest living artwork
Although he's one of Australia's most established, commercially successful and prolific artists, Dale Frank is a reluctant interview subject. Eccentric, reclusive, visionary, trailblazer — a sublime colourist, even a likeable arsehole — these are just some of the ways he's described. Which makes it even more remarkable that he agreed to be the subject of a documentary feature film, Nobody's Sweetie, a rare thing for a living Australian artist.
Olfactory artist Nadia Vitlin infuses her artwork with scent
Sydney-based artist Nadia Vitlin works with olfaction — our sense of smell — infusing her artwork, whether it be clay or paint, to create bespoke pieces that mimic the transportive power of scent: one of the most evocative, deeply personal and memory-laden senses humans possess. She experiments in the fourth dimension, and it all began with leaves from the garden and spices you might find in your kitchen.
Pio Abad on his 2024 Turner Prize nominated body of work
Just as historical objects in museum collections embody certain histories — of British imperialism and modernity — they also map loss and disappearance for those in former colonial states. Pio Abad, whose work is "concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects," has mined the stories embedded in certain cultural material such as kris, ceremonial swords from Mindanao, and a tiara worn by Imelda Marcos, the wife of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
One of Australia's most successful art partnerships
They used to lay-buy contemporary art together when they were low-paid gallery workers, forging a business relationship early on. Now, Ursula Sullivan and Joanna Strumpf are one of Australia's most successful art partnerships in terms of the cultural impact of the artists they represent — Tony Albert, Lindy Lee, Polly Borland, ex de Medici, Sam Leach, and Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, to name a few. This year, they're celebrating two decades together at the head of Sullivan + Strumpf.
How a child’s boomerang returns in the latest TarraWarra Biennial
It was while researching the provenance of a child’s boomerang, found in topsoil near the site of Melbourne Zoo, that Kimberley Moulton found the key to her curatorial vision for We Are Eagles, the latest edition of the TarraWarra Biennial. The Yorta Yorta curator worked with artefacts and other historical material at Melbourne Museum for years before moving into contemporary art in her current role at the Tate in London.
Dumped artist Khaled Sabsabi speaks out about impact of Creative Australia's Venice Biennale decision
Khaled Sabsabi, the Lebanese-Australian artist dumped as Australia's representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale, has spoken publicly for the first time since Creative Australia withdrew his highly prized commission. In an interview with ABC Radio National's The Art Show, Sabsabi described the impact of the Commonwealth arts funding body's February decision as "devastating".
Khaled Sabsabi speaks - ABC listen
The Lebanese-born Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi joins The Art Show exclusively to talk about the profound impact of the decision to unceremoniously dump him as Australia's representative artist to the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Monash University indefinitely postpones MUMA exhibition featuring Khaled Sabsabi work
An exhibition at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in Melbourne featuring Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi's work has been postponed indefinitely. Sabsabi, who is based in Western Sydney, was thrown into the national spotlight when he and curator Michael Dagostino were announced on February 7 as Australia's representatives at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Warraba Weatherall’s first institutional solo
For Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall, art that isn't a catalyst for something—that isn't driven by critique of gatekeeping museums, the criminal justice system, or the wilful historical amnesia and complacency—isn't worth making.
The truth behind Vincent Fantauzzo's verisimilitude
In art, verisimilitude — representing things as they appear — is something like telling the unvarnished truth and it makes perfect sense that it's the form in which Vincent Fantauzzo is most comfortable. His first commercial artworks were actually counterfeit 50 dollar notes, just one of the uncomfortable truths which he tells in his new autobiography, Unveiled.
Robots aside, Robert Andrew draws inspiration from country
Robert Andrew's artwork features simple robotic machines, with a stylus that impulsively draws or leaves a trace; not so much artificial intelligence as incidental happenstance. Although he works with technology, Andrew has always been deeply inspired by country. So it made sense that he was invited to make work for a new group exhibition at Bundanon, the timeless yet scarred landscape that figured in the paintings of its previous owner, Arthur Boyd.
Nici Cumpston: Indigenous artist turned curator to lead overseas museum
Nici Cumpston has played a transformative role at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Over the past 16 years she has driven First Nations curatorial practice to new heights, shaping what began as a biennial exhibition into a festival of contemporary Indigenous art that surveys artmaking across the continent.
An art historical approach to the work of Khaled Sabsabi
When questions were raised in Federal Parliament about two artworks by Khaled Sabsabi from 2006 and 2007, it was enough to convince Creative Australia to dump the artist from next year's Venice Biennale.
Polymorphous performers, The Huxleys, engender joy and seriousness
Driven by their mission statement to create a queer wonderland, Will and Gareth Huxley are true polymorphs. A real-life couple who rival camp predecessors Gilbert and George, Will and Gareth Huxley talk about their long-term collaboration and the transformation and reinvention that exemplifies queer experience. Garrett speaks about finding his voice as a Gumbaynggir and Yorta Yorta person ahead of The Huxleys' performance at the First Nations concert gala, Blak & Deadly.
Whatever happened to Ricky Swallow?
After rising to prominence locally in the early 2000s, Ricky Swallow left Australia and built an international art career with his small-scale, often intimate bronzes. Speaking from LA, Ricky talks about his unconscious move towards abstraction, his first foray into public art for Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, and the profound impact of the recent California fires.
CJ Hendry claims she's a 'shitty' artist. It's not hampering her huge success
"Am I an artist? No. Did I go to art school? No," CJ Hendry blurts out almost defensively from her warehouse studio in Brooklyn, New York. "Am I a trumped-up marketer? Probably. I'm completely unqualified in a whole bunch of shit. But here I stand," says the hard-working expat Australian. Her highly detailed drawings and flair for self-promotion have won her a vast social media following and phenomenal commercial success.
U.S. & China Trade Tensions Touch Global Electronics Supply Chain
//php echo do_shortcode('[responsivevoice_button voice="US English Male" buttontext="Listen to Post"]') ?> While the shifting political landscape and subsequent tension between America and China is no secret, the ripple effect is harder for the average citizen to perceive—especially when those ripples aren’t yet affecting their wallets.
APY Arts Centre Collective cleared by ORIC & the challenges facing the Australian music industry
After nearly two years of scrutiny, the remote art centre collective at the heart of claims of white interference in black art has been cleared for the fourth and final time. The Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations has concluded their investigation and decided to take no action. Gabriella Coslovich looks back at where the claims began and the impact they've had on the artists, curators, and administrators involved.
Topher Campbell splays his 'rukus' heart
What began as a living archive of queer Black British experience in the early 2000s has morphed into visual memoir for the interdisciplinary artist Topher Campbell. Told through three of his arthouse films including the uncompromising Fetish (2018) where he walks the streets of New York completely naked, an Afrofuturistic sculpture and intimate sound work composed of missed WhatsApp messages, Campbell isn't afraid to take risks.
Overland literary journal
The politics of memory — who and what we remember, who and what we forget — and the nexus between power and those events which, no matter how disconnected, are constructed as a nation’s “history”: these themes echo strongly in the anticolonial work of Swiss-Haitian artist Sasha Huber. Here, work is not a metaphor.
Latai Taumoepeau: This is not a drill
Latai Taumoepeau is an artist who thinks big. Not only is her subject matter expansive—the impact of global warming and rising sea levels in the South Pacific—increasingly she produces works of remarkable scale.
Vale Julie Copeland, a pioneering ABC Radio National broadcaster and mentor
"We stand on the shoulders of giants" is an oft-repeated saying among blackfellas. It's been repeated around the ABC in recent days following the news of the death of long-serving Radio National presenter Julie Copeland who, over the course of a long and distinguished career in the Australian media, became an institution in arts coverage.
CJ Hendry and who gets to decide 'what is art'
Blurring the line between commercial and high art, self-described Brisbane bogan CJ Hendry is a social media phenomenon. Her seductive, hyperreal drawings of luxury and consumer goods, combined with marketing nous and a flair for self-promotion, have earned the New York-based expat a global following and commercial success.
INTRODUCING - Arts in 30, coming to this feed soon - ABC listen
Your survival guide to arts and culture in Australia and across the globe, Arts in 30 with Daniel Browning is a new digest of the big stories in arts and entertainment from across the globe. Get up to speed with the news you need to know, plus the best stories and conversations from the Radio National arts desk, and new tracks for your playlist from music correspondents across the ABC’s music networks..
The Art Show - ABC listen
The Art Show brings you great conversations with Australian and international visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators. We’re the 'go-to' place for issues affecting artists and audiences, prizes, arts news and reviews.
Sarah Contos looks over the Eye Lash Horizon, APA celebrates Intimate Imaginaries and Monica Rani Rudhar on personal stories writ large
In her complex installations, featuring dozens on objects and materials, Sarah Contos imbues and perceives a sensuality within everyday objects. She explores the mind, the womb, the soul and the belly of her major new exhibition, Eye Lash Horizon. Monica Rani Rudhar explores how art has deepened her connection with her family and explains the deeply personal root of her large-scale jewellery.
Ramesh Nithiyendran's inner sanctum and Jack Wilkie-Jans on If Not Critical
Over the past decade, Ramesh Nithiyendran has become one of the most visible artists of his generation and one of the most hardworking with his signature emoji-like, wildly coloured and often multiple-limbed sculptures making their presence felt across the globe. Daniel drops in on Ramesh as he prepares to unveil his next big solo exhibition - including his magnum opus, a self-deity in bronze. And the first in an occasional series If Not Critical, we meet art critic (and artist) Jack Wilkie-Jans.
That’s not a medium! Art made from unusual material
Sasha Huber is Swiss-Haitian… but she lives and works in Finland. She’s got a truly interdisciplinary practice - but she does have one particular medium, that’s quite unusual - in fact, it’s hard to imagine how she makes art from this non-art material. Her medium is the humble staple - not your desk type - she packs a semi-automatic staple gun like the ones tradies use. Sasha's work can be seen at Crepusculumalong with artist Petri Saarikko at Gallery Project8 in Melbourne until 14 September.
Street art in ascendence; the art of RONE and Manda Lane
The artist RONE was always attracted to street art's impermanence. He's since moved beyond street art and into large scale installations, involving space, sound, music, light and large scale art pieces, that breathe life into the rooms of decaying mansions and inside spaces.
Joyful ceramics, the NATSIAAs and a glimpse of Renaissance Europe
Ceramicist Vipoo Srivilasa’s work is beautiful, playful and highly technical…and he’s having a moment, featuring in several exhibitions this year including the MAKE Award, Generation Clay and re/JOY. His work is a beacon of light and happiness in dark times. We swing by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) in Darwin, where artist Noli Rictor, a Pitjantjatjara man from Tjuntjuntjara in Western Australia, won the overall award for his work on canvas, Kamanti.
The "master of time" Hiroshi Sugimoto + the much prized lutruwita landscape
Hiroshi Sugimoto's sublime black and white photographs capture subjects as diverse as polar bears and landscapes, to portraits of Princess Diana – but they're not what they seem. Called 'master of time', Sugimoto is also an architect, designing galleries and art installations around the world. Daniel speaks with him at his big exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. In lutruwita / Tasmania, three young artists share a city studio and depict the local landscape in very different styles.
Black Modernism with Huey Copeland + cartoonist Mandy Ord
Art historian Huey Copeland is hard at work on what he says will be “the first gender-balanced and racially integrated history of Western modernism”. Daniel speaks with Huey about the racist underpinnings behind common interpretations of a couple of famous paintings, and what the future of art history holds. Australian cartoonist and illustrator Mandy Ord makes the mundane profound, with trademark wit and touching humour. She speaks with Rosa about her latest book Bulk Nuts.
Destiny’s children: Destiny Deacon
The internationally recognised Blak artist is remembered as a mentor, a political activist and a visionary who subverted racist tropes I want my pictures to tell a story. Stories of Blak/Koori identity. Racism and sexism. Plus, the truth as I know it.
Kelly Koumalatsos + abstract painter Lesley Dumbrell + Claudia Nicholson
Three women and three artists with three very different ways of looking at the world: Kelly Koumalatsos has a book out (Madjem Bambandila) that charts three and half decades of her art practice (including possum skin cloak making) that is always embedded in culture. At 82, abstract painter Lesley Dumbrell has her first career survey at a major state gallery, Lesley Dumbrell: Thrum.
Iris van Herpen: the Dutch fashion designer who sculpts clothing - ABC listen
She’s an artist whose medium is fashion. Dutch designer Iris van Herpen is an innovator, remaking high fashion to be wearable art - fabric is almost plastic in her hands, moulding and shaping it so that it becomes a sculptural form. The first designer to ever 3D print a dress, her atelier in Amsterdam is more like a problem-solving incubator. She trained with Alexander McQueen, and like him there’s a sense in her designs of female empowerment, even if it accords with socially acceptable femininity.
The Sex Life of Stone and Machine Drawing - ABC listen
What does a historic bark painting from Arnhem Land have to do with manganese, the metal that makes lustrous gold and liquid black ceramic glazes? It’s one of the tangents in American interdisciplinary artist Candice Lin's first solo exhibition in Australia, along with cat-led tours, wolf’s urine and the sea cucumber, the aphrodisiac fished for hundreds of years in the waters of northern Australia.
How do you capture African fashion? And When Solidarity is Not a Metaphor
Fashion is not a luxury; it’s a crucial part of the social fabric of many African countries. Capturing this diversity in an exhibition was the monumental task for Christine Checinska, the Senior Curator of African Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum, UK. Africa Fashion is touring the world, bringing diverse voices from the African diaspora to the forefront.
What happened to Thailand's Ban Chiang relics? Plus Judy Watson's life of art
A culture that flourished 3,500 years ago in Thailand. They made jewellery and ceramics, not war. You may never have heard of Ban Chiang —That’s possibly because the objects that tell the story of this fascinating archaeological site are in limbo, caught between voracious collectors, tomb-raiding locals and undercover federal agents. Art historian Dr Melody Rod-ari tells Daniel the story. First broadcast November 2023.
Alphonse Mucha and the popularity of Art Nouveau
This week it's The Art (Nouveau) Show! Flowers, peacocks and sensuous drapes. Bejewelled women entwined in billowing hair and that classic black outline, that turns the dreamy into the bold – the NEW. Despite what we may think about the arts and crafts that came out of Belgium, France and Czechia at the turn of the nineteenth century, Art Nouveau was considered to be an ultra-modern aesthetic. One artist who defined the style is Alphonse Mucha.
Laura Jones wins the Archibald portrait prize + Jeremy Deller
Big-name conceptual artist - four words you don’t often hear together. But Jeremy Delleris one - he’s a household name in Britain, but a few years back he sparked controversy here when he made giant wax candles of Rupert Murdoch and son Lachlan, and let them burn. The Turner Prize-winning artist also orchestrates mass public spectacles that bridge the worlds of contemporary art and pop culture. Daniel catches up with Archibald Prize winner Laura Jones, who painted author Tim Winton.
Warrior Woman: The Legacy of Destiny Deacon (1957-2024)
One of Australia’s most internationally renowned artists recast Aboriginal kitsch as the stuff of high art No one inconsequential was ever called Destiny. For the past three decades until her death last month at the age of sixty-eight, Destiny Deacon plied her trade as an urban Indigenous Australian contemporary artist with no precedent or female role model in her generation.
Remembering trailblazing artist Destiny Deacon
We remember the life of the iconic artist Destiny Deacon, with curator Natalie King, and a cast of friends who sent us voice memos. She was the first artist to creatively reuse Aboriginal kitsch - and to make it the stuff of high art. A cultural icon, she was an outlier - a quirk of the artworld - whose strikingly original vision and prolific output found her an international audience.
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