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Tuesday 11am - 5pm Wednesday 11am - 5pm Thursday 11am - 5pm Friday 11am - 5pm Saturday 11am - 5pm

Gertrude Contemporary, 21-31 High Steet, Preston (2026)

26/05/2026

It is the final week of Octopus 26: Melange⁠, curated by Krisna Sudharma⁠.
⁠
Until 30 May 2026⁠
Gertrude Contemporary⁠
21-31 High Street, Preston South⁠
Wurundjeri Country⁠
⁠
Noviadi Angkasapura, Kadek Armika, Mia Boe, Nyoman Darmawan, Maharani Mancanagara, Gian Manik, Todd McMillan, Galih Adika Paripurna, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Isadora Vaughan and Pande Wardina⁠

Read the full curatorial essay, ‘Melange’ written by Krisna Sudharma, in English and Bahasa translations online. 🔗⁠
⁠
⁠–

English:
https://gertrude.org.au/article/octopus-26-melange-essay-by-krisna-sudharma

Bahasa:
https://gertrude.org.au/article/octopus-26-melange-essay-by-krisna-sudharma-bahasa

The Octopus series of exhibitions has been supported by Proclaim since 2002.⁠
⁠
Supported by DESA Projects, Kemenbud and MTN.⁠
⁠
.vaughan .khin.boe ⁠
⁠
⁠
Octopus 26: Melange, installation view, Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm Melbourne, 2026, image courtesy and © the artists, photography: Christian Capurro

26/05/2026

Since 1985, Gertrude has supported contemporary artists to produce and present new works and has been central to the development of many leading artistic careers. Unique as an organisation in Australia and the region, our history includes almost 400 artists who have participated in the Studio Program, presenting new projects and exhibitions by thousands of artists.

By donating to Gertrude, you will contribute directly to Gertrude’s Studio and Artistic Program, along with public programs and initiatives supporting new generations of artists, writers, curators and performers.

Gertrude's model has shaped how contemporary art is supported and presented in Australia, showing sustained institutional commitment to experimental practice.

Donations of up to $1,000 strengthen the foundations of what we do by keeping entry free, supporting the presentation of public programs, original writing and education activities that enhance audience understanding and experience of contemporary art.

As a Gertrude supporter, you will be invited to VIP exhibition previews and invite-only events with our artists and curators. You will also have first access to the annual Gertrude Edition.

Contribute directly to the strength of our community and support the future of contemporary art by considering a donation to Gertrude this financial year.

All donations over $2 are tax-deductible.

Find out more information about the impact of your donations.

https://gertrude.org.au/donate

22/05/2026

Priyageetha Dia ⁠
salt⁠
⁠
13 June – 8 August 2026⁠
Gertrude Contemporary ⁠
21-31 High Street, Preston South⁠
Wurundjeri Country⁠
⁠
Opening event: 12 June 2026, 6-8pm⁠
⁠
Join us on Friday 12 June from 6-8pm for the opening event of 'salt' – Priyageetha Dia’s first solo exhibition in Australia.⁠ ⁠
⁠
As a mineral compound, salt (NaCl) precedes human history and has long been implicated in the structures of trade and labour. It has shaped, scarred and sustained life across this planet in ways that continue to unfold. Salt preserves, extending the life of organic matter beyond its natural limit, while also corroding, gradually compromising whatever it encounters over time. Salt also plays a crucial role in the human body, present in blood, tears and sweat. Any account of salt should therefore contend with its simultaneous presence in geological formation, economic structure and bodily process, none of which can be understood in isolation from the others.⁠
⁠
It is within this refusal – of the partition between ecological, corporeal, and technological analysis – that Priyageetha Dia’s new solo exhibition locates itself. As an artist working between Singapore and The Netherlands, Priyageetha approaches salt not simply as a material, but as a connective agent through which the entanglements of colonial history, diasporic experience and extractivist regimes across Southeast Asia and the broader Asia-Pacific region can be traced.⁠
⁠
salt binds three key moving image works along a crystalline axis: The Sea is a Blue Memory (2022), Lament H.E.A.T. (2023), and Night Shift (2025), each engaging salt through one of its bodily registers.⁠
⁠
_⁠
⁠
⁠
Priyageetha Dia (b. 1992, Singapore) is an interdisciplinary artist working across time-based media and installation. Her practice examines entangled afterlives of colonial extraction and racialised labour, tracing their mutations within contemporary digital infrastructures. ⁠
⁠
_⁠
⁠
⁠
Priyageetha Dia, LAMENT H.E.A.T (excerpt), 2023, single-channel digital video, colour, sound, image courtesy of the artist and The Ryder Projects, Madrid © the artist⁠
⁠dia

https://gertrude.org.au/exhibition/priyageetha-dia-salt

22/05/2026

Shireen Taweel⁠
pacing seven circles⁠
⁠
13 June – 8 August 2026⁠
Gertrude Contemporary ⁠
21-31 High Street, Preston South⁠
Wurundjeri Country⁠
⁠
Opening event: 12 June 2026, 6-8pm⁠
Artist talk & publication launch from 5pm⁠

Join us on Friday 12 June from 5pm for a discussion with Artistic Director Mark Feary and exhibiting artist Shireen Taweel on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition pacing seven circles at Gertrude Contemporary.

The artist talk will celebrate the launch of significant monograph Shireen Taweel: The Trig Point (2026), published by Art Ink, and be followed by the exhibition opening event from 6 – 8pm.
⁠
pacing seven circles looks at the mobility of sanctuary, in which relocation, adaptation and repurposing form a process of sacred place making. Existing outside of the representation of past and future, the installation as sacred space sits in a temporal geography of existence and fabulation. pacing seven circles assembly of geometry, is the architectural infrastructure of a future oriented ritual. Draped in a fabric of blazing red pigment, it is unclear and fragile, although resilient in its radiating magnitude. Sculptural forms settle in the circles of fabric. The pierced copper forms are dislocating temporal markers of time, faith and science. Resonating with abstraction and vibration the pulse of the installation is of one who finds sanctuary in the unacquainted landscape.⁠
⁠
Shireen Taweel is represented by , Naarm Melbourne and Sydney.⁠
⁠
This project is supported by Creative Australia’s Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy (VACS) Major Commissioning Projects fund. ⁠
⁠
pacing seven circles is an iterative exhibition presented with the trig point at Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney (2026) and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand (2027).⁠
⁠
Shireen Taweel, pacing seven circles (excerpt), 2026, two channel mixed media installation, video courtesy and © the artist⁠
⁠

Shireen Taweel⁠
pacing seven circles⁠
⁠
13 June – 8 August 2026⁠
Gertrude Contemporary ⁠
21-31 High Street, Preston South⁠
Wurundjeri Country⁠
⁠
Opening event: 12 June 2026, 6-8pm⁠
Artist talk & publication launch from 5pm⁠
⁠
Join us on Friday 12 June from 5pm for a discussion with Artistic Director Mark Feary and exhibiting artist Shireen Taweel on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition 'pacing seven circles' at Gertrude Contemporary.⁠
⁠
The artist talk will celebrate the launch of significant monograph Shireen Taweel: The Trig Point (2026), published by Art Ink, and be followed by the exhibition opening event from 6 – 8pm.⁠
⁠
pacing seven circles looks at the mobility of sanctuary, in which relocation, adaptation and repurposing form a process of sacred place making. Existing outside of the representation of past and future, the installation as sacred space sits in a temporal geography of existence and fabulation. pacing seven circles assembly of geometry, is the architectural infrastructure of a future oriented ritual. Draped in a fabric of blazing red pigment, it is unclear and fragile, although resilient in its radiating magnitude. Sculptural forms settle in the circles of fabric. The pierced copper forms are dislocating temporal markers of time, faith and science. Resonating with abstraction and vibration the pulse of the installation is of one who finds sanctuary in the unacquainted landscape.⁠
⁠
Shireen Taweel is represented by , Naarm Melbourne and Sydney.⁠
⁠
This project is supported by Creative Australia’s Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy (VACS) Major Commissioning Projects fund. ⁠
⁠
pacing seven circles is an iterative exhibition presented with the trig point at Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney (2026) and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand (2027).⁠
⁠
Shireen Taweel, pacing seven circles (excerpt), 2026, two channel mixed media installation, video courtesy and © the artist⁠
⁠

https://gertrude.org.au/exhibition/shireen-taweel-pacing-seven-circles

20/05/2026

Dredging up the Past: Gertrude 2005–2025, co-published by Perimeter Editions and Gertrude, is available to purchase.

Dredging up the Past is an exhibition by Richard Bell (Jiman, Kooman, Kamilaroi, Gurang Gurang), presented alongside an exhibition by Shane Cotton (Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) in 2018, inaugurating the first full year of programming at Gertrude Contemporary in Preston South.

‘Dredging up the past’ is an apt framework for thinking about organisational history. Rather than selectively reducing the archive to the stories of a few, this publication records everything possible and affords it equal importance; an excavation of each brick in Gertrude’s foundations.

One polyphonic text draws on the contributions of former directors, curators, staff, studio artists, and board members to share anecdotes of conceptual risk during their time associated with Gertrude, and we gratefully thank these contributors for their generosity, insight and humour: Kyp Bosci, Samantha Comte, Jacqueline Doughty, Alexie Glass-Kantor, Helen Grogan, Brent Harris, Susan Jacobs, Mathew Jones, Danny Lacy, Rose Lang, Jason Phu, Michael Schwarz and Tim Riley Walsh.

Creative and critical texts include authors James Nguyen, Nat Thomas, Kim Donaldson, Mark Feary and Tracy Burgess.

The publication is made with the generous support of the Gordon Darling Foundation, 101 Collins and Creative Australia's Plus1 Initiative.

Sincere thanks to Nathan Beard, Charlotte Day and Tamsen Hopkinson⁠ for launching the publication alongside Mark Feary at the foot of Yayoi Kusama's 'Dancing Pumpkin' (2020) for at the NGV. Photos: Machiko Abe.

Copies available onsite and online.

https://gertrude.org.au/publications/dredging-up-the-past-gertrude-2005-2025

.riley.walsh .art

australia

19/05/2026

INVITATION

Opening: Thursday 28 May, 6 – 8pm⁠

29 May – 27 June 2026⁠
Gertrude Glasshouse⁠
44 Glasshouse Road, Collingwood⁠
Wurundjeri Country⁠
⁠
Grace Culley’s Get Away explores the desire for escapism, the means by which it can be carried out, and the factors that motivate this type of thinking. The exhibition’s title alludes to the choice of removing oneself from unideal circumstances, a statement telling someone to leave, and a common phrase referring to a holiday. ⁠
⁠
As a starting point, Get Away draws upon Culley’s experience of moving between regional Victoria and the inner-city suburbs, before returning to the outskirts of Metropolitan Melbourne. What began as a personal exploration was later expanded through lateral-thinking research into different cultural movements that were, in part, motivated by a desire to escape aspects of the times in which they existed. In this new installation, Culley patchworks botanical paintings and sculptures over airbrushed images of architectural remains of the British Industrial Revolution, cottages and references to her various homes. ⁠
⁠
By leaning into botanical shapes and naturalistic interior decor, Culley blurs the lines between internal and external spaces, both real and imagined. Layering these works over a backdrop of smoke-like paintings, Culley selectively covers or reveals specific memories and references driving her daydreams of escaping to an isolated cottage – each work forming a unique yet important piece of an incomplete puzzle. ⁠
⁠
Gertrude Glasshouse is generously supported by Michael Schwarz and David Clouston.⁠
⁠

https://gertrude.org.au/exhibition/grace-culley-get-away

16/05/2026

Final day & artist talk:⁠
⁠
Moorina Bonini⁠
We Were Never Meant to be Contained⁠
⁠
Join us today at 3pm for a discussion of the exhibition between artist Moorina Bonini and Artistic Director Mark Feary. ⁠
⁠
Until 16 May 2026⁠
Gertrude Glasshouse⁠⁠
44 Glasshouse Road, Collingwood⁠
Wurundjeri Country⁠
⁠
In the 1975 poetic text, The Concrete Box, Aunty Hyllus Maris, a significant Yorta Yorta activist, educator and writer, and matriarch of the artist's family, describes the shared struggles of Aboriginal people across so-called Australia. She writes of a ‘concrete box’ built and governed by the white man, and of a small mountain of keys through which Kooris search for the one that will unlock our freedom. The key itself will unlock the concrete box and the Aboriginal people who are trapped, sick and hungry within the concrete box will be free. This key, she says, will bring ‘freedom, peace of mind, [and] health.’ Through this exhibition, Bonini continues to build upon the critique of western discourse offered by Aunty Hyllus, as she also shares the same resisting drive, that one day ‘our people will be free.’⁠
⁠
Building on Aunty Hyllus’s critique of western systems and her vision of liberation, it asks: What is the key that will free us from the colonial project into which we have been forced? This new work considers the colonial mindset and the recurring cycles of power and ownership over Country, cycles designed to maintain Aboriginal people in a position of enforced inferiority within so-called Australia. ⁠
⁠
The work comprises 7,000 metal keys engraved with South-Eastern Aboriginal mark-making. For millennia, these marks have been applied to cultural material as expressions of Aboriginal knowledge. ⁠
⁠
This project has been supported by the City of Yarra through its Small Project Grants program.⁠
⁠
Gertrude Glasshouse is generously supported by Michael Schwarz and David Clouston.⁠
⁠
Moorina Bonini, We Were Never Meant to be Contained, installation view, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm Melbourne, 2026, work © the artist, photograph: Christian Capurro⁠
⁠
https://gertrude.org.au/exhibition/moorina-bonini-we-were-never-meant-to-be-contained

09/05/2026

Publication Launch Event⁠
Melbourne Art Book Fair⁠
Sunday 17 May, 3pm⁠
Federation Court, NGV⁠
⁠
Join us on Sunday 17 May at 3pm for the official launch of the brand new book Dredging up the Past: Gertrude 2005–2025, co-published by Perimeter Editions and Gertrude and launching at MABF 2026.⁠
⁠
Speakers | Nathan Beard, Charlotte Day, Mark Feary and Tamsen Hopkinson⁠
⁠
Situating Gertrude’s history within a broader arc of contemporary art institutions, the publication launch event will discuss the tensions between archival impulse and forward momentum, how institutions narrate themselves, and how might those narratives be productively unsettled.⁠
⁠
Copies available from Perimeter throughout MABF!⁠
⁠
Co-Published by and ⁠
Edited ⁠
Designed ⁠
Commissioned texts ⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
– ⁠
⁠
Nathan Beard is a former Gertrude Studio Artist who works across photography, sculpture and installation to draw on personal archives, family objects and ornamental motifs to examine what it means to inherit a relationship to culture that is shaped by both proximity and distance. ⁠
⁠
Charlotte Day is the Director of the Potter Museum of Art and Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, and brings a long-standing relationship to Gertrude to the conversation, having worked at Gertrude in the 1990s, and as editor of the organisation’s 20-year anniversary publication, A Short Ride in a Fast Machine: Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces 1985–2005 (2005).⁠
⁠
Tamsen Hopkinson is an artist, curator and curatorial consultant. Hopkinson is the Director of .studio_ a curatorial consultancy specialising in contemporary art across the Asia Pacific, and curated Octopus 23: THE FIELD at Gertrude Contemporary in 2023.⁠
⁠
Mark Feary is the Artistic Director of Gertrude. He has worked within the visual art sector for over twenty years in a range of contemporary art centres, universities, museums and artist-led initiatives.⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
https://gertrude.org.au/public-program/publication-launch-or-dredging-up-the-past-gertrude-2005-2025
– ⁠
⁠
⁠
10am-5pm, 15-17 May⁠

09/05/2026

Next at Gertrude Contemporary

Priyageetha Dia
salt

13 June – 8 August 2026
Gertrude Contemporary ⁠
21-31 High Street, Preston South⁠
Wurundjeri Country⁠

Opening event: 12 June 2026, 6-8pm⁠

salt is Priyageetha Dia’s first solo exhibition in Australia.

As a mineral compound, salt (NaCl) precedes human history and has long been implicated in the structures of trade and labour. It has shaped, scarred and sustained life across this planet in ways that continue to unfold. Salt preserves, extending the life of organic matter beyond its natural limit, while also corroding, gradually compromising whatever it encounters over time. Salt also plays a crucial role in the human body, present in blood, tears and sweat. Any account of salt should therefore contend with its simultaneous presence in geological formation, economic structure and bodily process, none of which can be understood in isolation from the others.

It is within this refusal – of the partition between ecological, corporeal, and technological analysis – that Priyageetha Dia’s new solo exhibition locates itself. As an artist working between Singapore and The Netherlands, Priyageetha approaches salt not simply as a material, but as a connective agent through which the entanglements of colonial history, diasporic experience and extractivist regimes across Southeast Asia and the broader Asia-Pacific region can be traced.

salt binds three key moving image works along a crystalline axis: The Sea is a Blue Memory (2022), Lament H.E.A.T. (2023), and Night Shift (2025), each engaging salt through one of its bodily registers.

_

Priyageetha Dia (b. 1992, Singapore) is an interdisciplinary artist working across time-based media and installation. Her practice examines entangled afterlives of colonial extraction and racialised labour, tracing their mutations within contemporary digital infrastructures. She mobilises speculative methodologies to destabilise dominant historiographies and render visible the mechanisms through which power materialises.

Recent exhibitions include: everything you need to see is already in front of you, Riga Photography Biennale, Riga (2026); kokki, The RYDER Projects, Madrid (2026); Motherboards, San Jose Museum of Art, California (2026); Reworlding, starch, Singapore (2026); AUTOPOIESIS: A Song for Resuscitation, Arthshila Goa, Nachinola, India (2026); Munch Triennale: Almost Unreal, Munchmuseet, Oslo (2025); Aichi Triennale: A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Aichi Arts Centre, Nagoya (2025); Synthetic Fever, Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul (2025); Avatars, Proxies, and Digital Twins, Tate, London (2025); 4th Bangkok Art Biennale: Nurture Gaia, Queen Sirikit National Convention Center, Bangkok (2024); Manifesta 15: Imagining Futures, Mataró Art Contemporani, Barcelona (2024); The Spirits of Maritime Crossing, Palazzo Mangilli Valmarana, 60th La Biennale di Venezia Collateral Event (2024); and Diriyah Biennale: After Rain, Jax District, Diriyah, Saudi Arabia (2024). Priyageetha is represented by The RYDER Projects, Madrid.

https://gertrude.org.au/exhibition/priyageetha-dia-salt

Priyageetha Dia, LAMENT H.E.A.T (excerpt), 2023, single-channel digital video, colour, sound, image courtesy of the artist and The Ryder Projects, Madrid © the artist

08/05/2026

“I often find myself returning to a personal realisation: harapan, dan hal yang abstrak hampir mungkin tujuannya rimpang—that hope, and abstract things, almost certainly find their purpose in the rhizome; sprawling, interconnected, and subterranean.”⁠
⁠
Read the full curatorial essay, ‘Melange’ written by Krisna Sudharma, online. 🔗⁠
⁠
-⁠
⁠
Until 30 May 2026⁠
Gertrude Contemporary⁠
21-31 High Street, Preston South⁠
Wurundjeri Country ⁠
⁠
‘A mind is a thing that endures.’ When French philosopher Henri Bergson asserted this, he suggested that to endure is not simply to survive; it means that it is our duration—our passage through time—that truly thinks, feels, and sees. The first creation of consciousness is its own speed in time-distance: a causal idea, an idea before the idea.⁠
⁠
Odd though it may be, the premise of this exhibition begins right here, in the space between a mother’s warning to be careful and a philosopher’s realisation that we are shaped by how we endure time. It begins in a phonetic accident, a slip of the tongue between two languages that reveals the quiet tension of our shared geography.⁠
⁠
On one hand, there is the mélange: a mixture, a medley, a distinctively anti-essentialist state where Indonesian and Australian identities blur and entangle. On the other, echoing the local vernacular of my childhood like an odd heckle of linguistics, is the Balinese imperative melahang: a command to handle with extreme care, to fix what is broken, or to split a material carefully along its natural grain.⁠
⁠
It is within this friction—between the desire to mix uncontrollably and the deep-seated necessity to be careful—that this exhibition operates.⁠
⁠
The Octopus series of exhibitions has been supported by Proclaim since 2002.⁠
⁠
Octopus 26: Melange is supported by DESA Projects, Kemenbud and MTN.⁠

https://gertrude.org.au/article/octopus-26-melange-essay-by-krisna-sudharma

07/05/2026

Next at Gertrude Contemporary

Shireen Taweel
pacing seven circles

13 June – 8 August 2026
Gertrude Contemporary ⁠
21-31 High Street, Preston South⁠
Wurundjeri Country⁠

Opening event: 12 June 2026, 6-8pm⁠

pacing seven circles looks at the mobility of sanctuary, in which relocation, adaptation and repurposing form a process of sacred place making. Existing outside of the representation of past and future, the installation as sacred space sits in a temporal geography of existence and fabulation. pacing seven circles assembly of geometry, is the architectural infrastructure of a future oriented ritual. Draped in a fabric of blazing red pigment, it is unclear and fragile, although resilient in its radiating magnitude. Sculptural forms settle in the circles of fabric. The pierced copper forms are dislocating temporal markers of time, faith and science. Resonating with abstraction and vibration the pulse of the installation is of one who finds sanctuary in the unacquainted landscape.

Shireen Taweel is represented by STATION, Naarm Melbourne and Sydney.

This project is supported by Creative Australia’s Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy (VACS) Major Commissioning Projects fund.

pacing seven circles is an iterative exhibition presented with the trig point at Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney (2026) and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand (2027).

Shireen Taweel, pacing seven circles (excerpt), 2026, two channel mixed media installation, video courtesy and © the artist

https://gertrude.org.au/exhibition/shireen-taweel-pacing-seven-circles

Gertrude Contemporary

26/05/2026

26/05/2026

22/05/2026

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20/05/2026

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07/05/2026

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Tuesday	11am - 5pm
Wednesday	11am - 5pm
Thursday	11am - 5pm
Friday	11am - 5pm
Saturday	11am - 5pm