For Tapaya Edwards, accompanying an important cultural piece thousands of kilometres across the world extends beyond himself - it's a continued line of expression he was passed down by his ancestors.
The mass-scale, multimedia and collaborative exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters opens at the Museokeskus Vapriikki museum in Tampere, Finland this week.
Through weaving sections of Central and Western Desert songlines - harnessed in song, dance, photography and more than 300 paintings and featuring more than 100 artists initiated as a preservation of a critical piece of their culture and its foundations - Tjukurpa.
The Seven Sisters creation story holds strong ties to language groups, country and constellations in the skies from the western coast and stretching across the continent.
Mr Edwards, from Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, and Corban Williams, a Martu man, are two cultural ambassadors who will accompany the work in Finland.
Imparted with the Seven Sisters story by his grandparents, Mr Edwards told National Indigenous Times he holds a sense of importance and pride for "giving a piece of our culture for people to understand and recognise", and being a part of that ongoing story as it passes down through not just ongoing generations, but farther corners of the world.
"I'm there to represent the songline and represent my art centre, elders and my old people," Mr Williams added.
Already featured in the UK, Berlin and Paris in recent years after exhibition at Perth's the Western Australian Museum, the assortment debuted in 2017 at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.
Senior Ngaanyatjarra woman and Seven Sisters custodian of Kuru Ala - a sacred place in the creation story, Julie Laidlaw Porter told John Paul Janke she's travelling for the safety of the exhibition, for her country.
"I am trying to stand strong for Kuru Ala, for the Seven Sisters," she said.
Audiences effectively walk through the songlines expressed in the collection.
The world's highest resolution travelling DomeLab - a seven-metre encompassing overhead projection space, displays South Australian rock art captured, animated art works and a viewscape of the Orion constellation and the Pleiades star cluster central to Seven Sisters.
The skies provide and diverse cultural link to the songlines, in their own ways and versions, Mr Edwards said.
The Pleiades has roots in various mythologies in other parts of the world.
"The Seven Sister stories is all over. Not only in Australia, it's all over the world, I suppose. Different cultures do have a Seven Sister songline as well."
Lead curator and Emeritus Curatorial Fellow, First Nations, at the National Museum of Australia and lead curator - Margo Ngawa Neale - explained the exhibition expands past a strict definition.
"Songlines are a knowledge system. They can be visualised as corridors or pathways of knowledge that crisscross the continent, laid down by creator beings over millennia. It is along these routes mapped by ancestral beings that Indigenous people travelled to learn from Country as one would access knowledge from libraries," Ms Neale said.
"The Seven Sisters songlines are among the most significant of the extensive creation tracks that crisscross Australia. The story of the Seven Sisters is one of pursuit and escape, desire and magic, and the power of family bonds
"Together with the community curatorium we are gratified that this exhibition, which drew record crowds in Australia, is now being seen internationally.
"One of the prime motivations of the exhibition was not only to preserve and strengthen the songlines but also to share with the world the contemporary relevance of the ancient wisdoms they contain or convey.
"This is not an art exhibition, a history exhibition or a science exhibition. It is all of these. It is both an Australian Aboriginal exhibition and a universal story of humankind. It offers us connectivity to each other and our planet in a fragmenting world," Ms Neale said.
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters opens in Finland this week.
