Outer Space X 10
Outer Space Celebrating 10 Years with the Launch of its 2026 Artistic Program
In 2026, as Outer Space celebrates a decade of championing artist-led, experimental, and socially engaged practice, we are proud to present our 2026 Main Gallery Program. This program reflects ten years of commitment to supporting ambitious and innovative contemporary art, featuring a dynamic lineup of exhibitions by artists from Magandjin (Brisbane), Queensland, and beyond.
The 2026 program encompasses installation, sculpture, photography, sound, performance, and interdisciplinary works that push boundaries and spark meaningful dialogue. Across the year, these exhibitions explore urgent and resonant themes including climate crisis, cultural memory, Indigenous and diasporic knowledge, futurism, resistance, and collective care. Together, they reaffirm Outer Space’s enduring role as a vital platform for contemporary artistic practice in Magandjin (Brisbane).
Merinda Davies
12 Jun - 18 Jul
Symbiotic Marathon is an exercise program for the future, where apocalypse meets the wellness industry. The work imagines a near future in which breathable air is no longer guaranteed, using exertion and breathlessness as a way to become aware of our messy entanglements and mutualistic relationships with other beings. Through this speculative framework, audiences are asked to recognise our reliance on trees in a time of accelerating climate-impacted air quality. Urgent and embodied, Symbiotic Marathon asks us to run to save ourselves and other beings, because nothing is more urgent than impending climate collapse.
q/g[h]ALBI
24 Jul - 29 Aug
The Woven Leaf is the first initiative in a durational series titled Collective Caring in Times of Continuous Crisis. The project maps intersecting SWANA narratives across homelands and the stolen lands of so-called Queensland, toward re-imagining new collective diasporic futures. Focusing on the politics of food, cultural production, and artistic expression, the exhibition traces how Indigenous knowledge and food practices have endured despite geopolitical and climate violence, colonisation, and the commodification of foodways. At its centre is the Olive Tree, Sumud / Zeitoun, serving as both material and conceptual frame to weave research, survival, resistance, and intergenerational culinary knowledge. Developed through slow, collective workshops, the project draws on the artists’ Palestinian, Lebanese, Iranian, and Egyptian heritage and lived experiences in so-called Queensland.
Jessica Dorizac
18 Sep - 24 Oct
Developed through a residency at Project Space Pilipinas (PSP) in Lucban, Quezon, the rice capital of the Philippines, Jessica Dorizac’s exhibition responds to the material and cultural traditions of the Pahiyas Festival. Through deep community engagement, learning how kiping (rice-based, leaf-shaped wafers) are made, and collaborating with farmers, cooks, craftspeople, and elders, the project honours intergenerational knowledge systems and shared labour. The resulting immersive, large-scale installation draws on the arangya chandeliers of Pahiyas, creating a suspended environment of fragile, light-responsive forms made from kiping and other locally learned techniques. Through colour, light, scent, and organic material, the work reflects both the exuberance and the temporality of agrarian and cultural cycles.
Curated by Libby Harward, the exhibition features new works by First Nations artists Bianca Bond, Malinda Flynn, Clea North, Brenda Mau, Lexie Abel, and Keely Eggmolesse. This exhibition extends the 2023 NO SOUVENIRS exhibition (The Old Ambo), advancing its rejection of commodification, exoticisation, and the tourist gaze on Blak art and Blak women into a sharper, politically charged continuation. The exhibition is neuro-affirming and shaped through trauma-informed, knowledge and strength-based practice. Immersive and visually and sonically layered, it combines textiles, projection, audio, and sculptural forms to unsettle the colonial gaze and assert Blak futures, while highlighting the role of urban contemporary art galleries in supporting regional and emerging artists and 100% Aboriginal-led arts organisations.
Kirralee Robinson
6 Feb - 14 Mar
Karlina Mitchell
20 Mar - 25 Apr
Nadeem Tiafau Eshraghi
1 May - 6 Jun
Libby Harward
30 Oct - 5 Dec
Hot Source presents a speculative relationship between the Outer Space gallery and the sun, imagined as a flirtatious, reciprocal, ongoing (albeit seasonal) crush. Hot Source includes installations and text inspired by Outer Space’s materiality and architecture, suggesting what this relationship may feel like.
Homeplace examines the cultural practices lost through ecological disasters currently impacting the Pacific, alongside Karlina Mitchell’s personal relationship to the loss of language. Drawing on the interior of a Fijian home, the work centres bright Bula print fabrics traditionally used in domestic decoration. Giant, room-sized curtains made from Fijian Bula print are stained at the base with mangrove dye and dirt, signifying the mangrove systems that sustain and protect Mitchell’s family village. Large-format black-and-white photographs of landscapes, details, and bodies of water are collaged directly onto the walls, then painted, embroidered, or spray-painted over, forming a layered meditation on home, loss, and ecological endurance.
Tautua Mutant Archives is an emergent offering of cultural variations emanating from the Great Ocean; Sāmoa. Using archival materials and contemporary processes, these new works consider grief, inheritance and cultural continuity amidst ongoing discourses from many perspectives, between islands, echoes and oceanic futurism.
These programs are made possible through generous funding support from the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, and the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.