Salote Tawale has spent two decades turning pop songs into portals, performing herself through Whitney Houston, through the fantasies pop music sells us in bars and back yards. Her karaoke nights have run at the Bearded Tit (RIP), inside her own Carriageworks survey and Campbeltown Arts Centre. At Superposition, she brings that same energy to Hotel Etico, late into the night. Grab the mic, lose the plot, mean every word of a song that isn't yours.
Salote Tawale’s work incorporates painting, performance, moving image and installation. Frequently combining humour and found materials with formal and personal archival research, Tawale’s work explores the ways race, gender and belonging inform societal roles, cultural tropes and colonial structures.
As a person living within diasporic communities, Tawale acknowledges the significance of Indigenous knowledge systems and the power of memory to convey both the nuances of individual experience and the formation of communal identity across generations. She is particularly interested in the many ways diasporic communities navigate, understand, resist and redefine their cultural positions.
Tawale has exhibited nationally and internationally, including in the Hawai‘i Triennial 2025; the 8th Yokohama Triennial; the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art; Carriageworks, Sydney; the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, and ParaSite, Hong Kong. She undertook an Indigenous Visual and Digital residency at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada and received the Inaugural 2017 Create NSW Visual Arts Midcareer/Established Fellowship. Tawale holds an undergraduate degree in Media Arts and a Master of Art from RMIT, and a Master of Fine Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, where she is currently a lecturer.