moving painting: for Kunmanara and Kwementyaye

This article introduces paintings by Pintupi/Luritja-Arrernte town camp artist Kunmanara M. Nampitjinpa Boko from the Tangentyere Artists group in Alice Springs and discusses a project we began together before her death, to explore new media futures for her graphic desert narratives. I argue that Kunmanara’s figurative and entextualized images articulate a specific central Australian mode of “survivance” and perform the “precarity” of their emergence through an aesthetic I call “vocal listening.” The artworks carry a new desert art “aura” linked to lived experiences of a bush-station-mission-community-outstation-town camp-town landscape that might “migrate” into animated, immersive, and interactive new media forms.