TEN
Robert Andrew, Max Athens, Tess Bakharia, Christopher Bassi, Naomi Blacklock, Amelia McLeish, Lửa / Lucy Nguyễn-Hunt, Parallel Park (Holly Bates and Tay Haggarty), Judy Watson, Keemon Williams.
13 May - 6 June 2026
Across the past decade, Brisbane’s cultural landscape has shifted significantly, shaped by changing political, social and economic conditions. Alongside this, we have seen the determination of artists and communities who continue to advocate for the value of contemporary art and culture.
Bringing together works from artists in the Outer Space community, TEN traces histories, captures moments in time, and speaks to the complexities of identity, memory and belonging. Connections between artists, communities and ideas emerge through visible and invisible threads, relationships formed over years of collaboration, solidarity and shared experience. These multiplicities sit alongside one another: moments of resistance and tenderness, exhaustion and joy, instability and possibility.
TEN does not seek to present a singular history of Outer Space, rather it embraces the significant and evolving nature of artistic and creative-led practice, experimentation and collective expression.
Participating artists: Robert Andrew, Max Athens, Tess Bakharia, Christopher Bassi, Naomi Blacklock, Amelia McLeish, Lửa / Lucy Nguyễn-Hunt, Parallel Park, Judy Watson, Keemon Williams.
Facade Projections:
Judy Watson 15th - 21st May
Max Athans 22nd - 28th May
Lửa / Lucy Nguyễn-Hunt 29th May - 4th June
Christopher Bassi 5th June - 12th June
ARTISTS
Robert Andrew
Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people, his Country is the lands and waters of the Broome area in the Kimberley Region, Western Australia. His work investigates the personal and family histories that have been denied or forgotten. Andrew’s work speaks to the past yet articulates a contemporary relationship to his Country, using technology to make visible the interconnecting spiritual, cultural, physical, and historical relationships with the land, waters, sky, and all living things. Andrew’s work often combines programmable machinery with earth pigments, ochres, rocks and soil to mine historical, cultural and personal events that have been buried and distanced by the dominant paradigms of western culture.
Max Athens
Max Athans is an artist working between Sculpture, Sound and Digital Media in Meanjin/Brisbane. Their work is concerned with hybrid beings, proxy bodies, and biological fantasies, often bridging physical forms and virtual images in uneasy tension.
Tess Bakharia
Tess Bakharia a curator/writer based on unceded Turrbal and Yuggera lands in Magandjin, Brisbane. Currently Curator at UAP (Urban Art Projects), Tess works at the nexus of art, people and place. Previous cross-overs with Outer Space include Promotions Officer (2022-23), volunteer, contributing writer and public program facilitator.
Christopher Bassi
Christopher Bassi (b. 1990, Brisbane, Australia) is an artist of Meriam, Yupungathi and British descent. Working with archetypal models of representational painting, his work engages with the medium as sociological and historical text and as a means to address issues surrounding cultural identity, alternative genealogies, and colonial legacies in Australia and the South Pacific. Through critical re-imagining, his paintings become a space for a type of speculative storytelling that consider questions of history and place and the entangling of personal and collective experience.
Naomi Blacklock
Naomi Blacklock is an artist based in Meanjin (Brisbane), Australia, whose practice navigates the intersections of embodied performance, cultural heritage, and gender identity. Working across experimental sound, performance, sculpture, and video installation, she reimagines mythologies and archetypes to challenge and reconfigure constructions of gender and culture. Her ritualised sound objects and performances amplify the body and voice through performative bodily precision and aural/oral expression, merging layered soundscapes, breathwork, and visceral screaming into sonic disruption.
Amelia McLeish
Amelia McLeish is a contemporary visual and sound artist, administrator and researcher based in Meanjin. Amelia's work examines the role of community within her local visual arts ecology of Meanjin/Brisbane. She produces work utilising a 'post production' methodology which appropriates, parodies and utilises mass media, culture and collectibles in order to contextualise the art and artists of her region. A core function of her practice is building opportunities for artists to practice, such as including other artists in her shows or work and organising events for artists to experiment and explore their artistic practice. Notable examples include Collectible Trading Cards (2021) which featured 80 artists as part of the project and distributed freely to the public. Additionally, she maintains a strong personal archive of exhibition ephemera, which she has previously displayed as part of her Master's exhibition Labour of Love (2021).
Lửa / Lucy Nguyễn-Hunt
Lucy Nguyễn-Hunt is an emerging Vietnamese, Sāmoan and Rarotongan artist currently based in naarm Melbourne. Her practice examines her place within an intersection of rich and deep cultural histories, whilst situated in Australia, carrying its own fraught and violent history. She observes these intergenerational ties through moving image, photography, lighting, poetics and sound. Interested in the persistence of cultural memory in spite of separation, Lucy uses her practice as a means of community connection to resist colonial erasure.
Parallel Park
Parallel Park is the collaborative art practice between artists Holly Bates and Tay Haggarty. The focus of the collaboration is concentrated on playfully exploring the external influences that impact queerness and the intricacies of the artist’s relationship. The collaboration heavily employs play as process, which takes form through performance, video and installation. The engagement with play and spontaneity allows for both practices to weave into the making process, resulting in erotically and humorously charged works that contain a strong sense of duality.
The duo have worked collaboratively for eleven years, exhibiting works at various spaces nationally such as UNSW (Sydney), Metro Arts (Brisbane), FELT Space (Adelaide), BUS Projects (Melbourne) and Hobiennalle (Hobart).
Judy Watson
Judy Watson was born in Mundubbera, Queensland. Judy Watson’s Aboriginal matrilineal family is from Waanyi country in north-west Queensland. The artist’s process evolves by working from site and memory, revealing Indigenous histories, following lines of emotional and physical topography that centre on particular places and moments in time.
Keemon Williams
Keemon Williams (b. 1999) is a queer interdisciplinary Meanjin (Brisbane) based artist and curator of Koa, Kuku Yalanji and Meriam Mir descent. He utilizes a diverse range of mediums and performative elements to interrogate the relationships between location, personal histories and the manifestation of culture in a postcolonial world. His practice seeks to critically examine facets of his identity and its intrinsic tethering to the wider context of being “Australian.” Responding to realms of space and time, cultural production and psuedo-ethnic representations, Keemon views culture as an alloy, to be forged and adapted to find belonging within and beyond the self.
TEN
Robert Andrew, Max Athens, Tess Bakharia, Christopher Bassi, Naomi Blacklock, Amelia McLeish, Lửa / Lucy Nguyễn-Hunt, Parallel Park (Holly Bates and Tay Haggarty), Judy Watson, Keemon Williams.13 May - 6 June 2026Outer Space
Open Wednesday to Saturday, 10am–5pm
420 Brunswick Street,
Judith Wright Arts Centre,
Fortitude Valley, QLD
Closing Night
6pm–9pm
Friday 5 June 2026
Free entry, all welcome
Performances
7:00pm → Noami Blacklock: Parallel Presence
8:00pm → Parallel Park (Holly Bates and Tay Haggarty): In Time from Can You Keep Me Occupied
Exhibition Text
Coming Soon
DOCUMENTATION
Louis Lim
This project is supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia.