Ray Mudjandi

Ray Mudjandi was born in Garramilla (Darwin) in the year 2000 and grew up between Djibiorrk in Kakadu National Park and Katherine in the Northern Territory. His family are Mirarr people from Kakadu and Western Arrernte from Central Australia. Mudjandi’s work expresses his Bininj culture and identity as well as his love of pop culture, contemporary film, comics and superheroes.

Mudjandi creates superhero character-based works of art, complete with intricate narratives and epic sagas of good versus evil, often in response to his surroundings and issues that affect him and his community. Mudjandi lives on Mirarr land, his mother’s Country, at Djirrbiyak outstation in Kakadu National Park. He draws inspiration in equal parts from both modern popular culture and the culturally significant djang (ancestral power) stories from Kakadu and Western Arnhem Land.

In March 2023, Mudjandi travelled down to Barrow Creek, Mparntwe (Alice Springs), Tjoritja (West MacDonnell Ranges) and Ntaria (Hermannsburg) to meet family on his father’s side for the first time. Mudjandi connected with family, Country, artists and Central Desert culture. During this trip Mudjandi developed ideas and sketches for a new superhero, Black Speed, Mudjandi’s latest superhero, who holds lightening in his body as djang (sacred power), represented on bark and relief sculpture.

Mudjandi described the new character’s origin story to his nanna;

Black Speed is black, wears yellow and orange. He’s got big nose like Bininj (people of western Arnhem Land), like this one.

‘Is that a shooting star or something? Let’s go and check.’

They walked to where that rock fell. It was red and gold, that tiny shiny rock. Black Speed, he touched it and it went to his heart, all the electricity. That electricity went everywhere in his body. It went through him like electric shock, through the veins and he was electrocuted, like in the brain! He couldn’t move his arms or legs, paralysed.

‘Why you got to touch that rock?’ his stepbrother said.

They called the clinic mob. In the clinic they did blood test, they looked with binoculars, went inside, but the blood was different colour. He see like round ones, like blood cells, and they were spinning around and he see lightning flashing in the blood.

The scientist is thinking, they thinking like he’s electric. Scientist tell the mother, ‘This boy is infected with something’, but the next day he was OK. There’s no pain, no anything. He is back to normal.

He woke up next morning and went to school with his brothers. At recess, they eat and go and play. One kid, he plays basketball, and they asked him to pass him the ball, and Black Speed he shoots the basketball in the goal, so fast and so far on top of the air. He looked up and he started freaking out, like ‘Oh, did you see? Did you see?’ And everyone saw!

That lightning is in his body and gave him Superpower.

Mudjandi’s Nanna, Maureen Campbell, said: ‘In our language, for Black Speed we say Maru Wala’.

Fun Fact

Do you want to be an artist, but think that maybe you are too young? Well, Mudjandi had his first exhibition at the age of 16 years, the works would later be acquired by Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. More recently, his work was highly commended in the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D award at the 2022 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.