The annual Being Collected Lecture was established more than two decades ago to acknowledge and celebrate the unique perspectives of curatorship from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Chau Chak Wing Museum is delighted to welcome Freja Carmichael to deliver the 2026 Being Collected lecture.
Belonging to an intergenerational family and community of weavers and artists, Freja Carmichael’s recent research brings together her curatorial practice as a Ngugi woman from Quandamooka Country to position Indigenous weaving-fibre practices and curating as embodiments of Indigenous collaboration, self-determination and relationality. In doing so, her work challenges simplified and reductive colonial constructs of Indigenous art, cultural histories and communities. Through her lived experience and curatorial perspective, Freja reflects on how Indigenous weaving-fibre practices, maintained by artists and communities, are informing new thinking about collaborative art practices, curatorship and exhibitions. This extends understandings of the critical, dynamic and creative roles of curating in generating spaces and platforms that connect communities, knowledges and cultures.
Freja Carmichael, to come together as water installation view at UQ Art Museum, 2025, featuring Megan Cope, Whispers (Poles), 2023. Image: Joe Ruckli
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LinkFreja Carmichael is a Ngugi woman from the Quandamooka people and is Curator at the University of Queensland Art Museum. Over the past 15 years, she has worked alongside First Peoples and communities on exhibitions, programming, collection research, and documentation at art centres, regional galleries, cultural gatherings, contemporary art spaces, and national and international institutions.
Freja’s work is dedicated to centring First Peoples’ knowledges, histories, creative practices, and fibre-weaving traditions, and to creating spaces for collaboration, intercultural exchange, and intergenerational sharing through curatorial approaches. Recent curatorial projects include to come together as water, UQ Art Museum (2025); co-curator of The National 4: Australian Art Now, Carriageworks (2023); the national touring exhibition long water: fibre stories (2020–22), Institute of Modern Art; and Weaving the Way (2019), UQ Art Museum. Freja is a member of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection Advisory Council at the University of Virginia, United States, and recently completed her PhD at the University of Queensland.
Header image: ungaire (swamp reed) on Quandamooka Country. Image: Rhett Hammerton.
