Seventh Gallery

22/06/2026

Timeball, opening this Thursday, 25 June, 6–8pm.

Katie Paine and Rachel Rovira
24 June – 15 August

Please join us for the opening of Timeball, the third and final chapter of Matter & Spirit, a series of exhibitions exploring matter, extraction, transformation, and site through the lens of vital materialism and political economy.

This final chapter closes the project with two studies of infrastructure and time, situated within this settler colony we call Australia. Time itself, as we experience it now, was and remains a colonial technology, standardised and broadcast to order commerce and movement across empire. The exhibition takes its name from something embedded in Katie's research yet curiously absent from the show itself. At Point Gellibrand in Williamstown, a time ball dropped from its tower at precisely one o'clock each day for over seventy years, from 1853 until 1926, broadcasting local time so that ships in the harbour could correct their chronometers before heading back out to sea. Rachel's work carries a version of this same impulse in the regimented schedules of gates opening and closing, irrigation systems triggered by timers, and the daily rhythms of maintenance work that keep a festival site running to time.

Katie draws on archival research into Hobson's Bay, tracing how telegraphy, maritime timekeeping and early rail worked to order land, labour and empire, and how these technologies persist by shapeshifting. Their cable routes now carry the fibre optic networks of a new kind of empire. Rachel's work emerges from her time on the maintenance crew at a festival in Adelaide, tracking the rhythms and routines of a temporary site shaped by flooding, drainage and colonial survey. In her work, maintenance emerges as an ongoing negotiation with forces that exceed control, where human intention encounters weather, growth, deterioration and the agency of matter itself. Together, both artists ask who controls time, who controls place, and what happens when those systems of order degrade, or transmute into something else entirely.

Image | Rachel Rovira, untitled sketch, 2026

This project is supported by the City of Yarra.

16/06/2026

We are inviting expressions of interest to take part in Sensing Seventh, an upcoming series of reading and writing sessions on sensory diversity in art and creative space, intersecting with disabled, neurodivergent and neuroqueer arts, theories and daydreams.

Taking on the ethos of a summer school, or a reading and writing group, our new slow school format resists linear, capitalist notions of time, inviting contemplation at different speeds and moments of stillness. In this spirit, sessions will spread out over Thursday evenings (5:30 to 7:30), every second week, from July until December, with participants welcome to drop in and out.

Folks will be invited to join in shared readings and discussions, encountering one chapter at a time from the book Exhibiting for Multiple Senses (Valiz), and at times guests will join us to share their perspectives and provocations. There will be no expectation that participants complete pre-reading; anyone is welcome to join, listen, have a chat and/or stim as we contemplate the gallery.

While these conversations take place, we will have drawing and sculpting exercises available on hand to stim and play with. Our communal mark-making will be collected to be included in an experimental publication documenting our time together.

In parallel with these conversations will be an optional pamphlet-making project, asking what the gallery is or might be, traversing the space along specific sensory lines.

There will be no set outcome or deadline, just a gradual presence of our writings, movements, drawings, and contemplations appearing in the gallery and/or website – and the ability for people to continue interacting and making, however they want, outside of the space.

To keep our sessions relaxed and intimate, this program is limited to 12 people per session.

Expressions of interest will be open until 25th June. Apply via the form linked in our bio. If the form presents any barriers for you, please reach out to us via message or email.

15/06/2026

Kvetch is a new independent Jewish zine, publishing material of the Jewish left!

Please join us this Thursday to launch its first edition with food, drinks, and community. Hear from some talented writers and artists, and get yourself a printed copy of the zine.

There are a few tickets left. Link in bio.
Thursday 18 June. 6-9pm at Seventh Gallery.

12/06/2026

A few more details from Kym Maxwell's installation - a body built from soil and coir husk, threaded with wire and yellow electrical cable, and the large drawing 'Gardening is not a hobby it's the only activity where you physically rehearse what happens after death'.

The drawing interprets what Kym learned in the process of uprooting: that a tree is an electrical conductor, its root system is in direct contact with the earth's electromagnetic field, and that vibration moves through it as information. Raku clay witchetty grubs sit in an unfired dish alongside the root system - materials that are still mid-transformation.

Strange Powers closes 13.6.26. Seventh Gallery, Collingwood.
📷 Meg de Young and Christian Capurro

11/06/2026

Strange Powers is in its final week. A few more details from Nicholas Burridge's installation - a short video work "No Pristine Nature", a rock sample from Tasmania (from a region that is a geologic twin to the Río Tinto Basin) and the electrical infrastructure that holds it all together.

Environmental scientist Rafael León Cortegano calculated that metals worth approximately 24 million euro wash from the Tinto and Odiel rivers into the Atlantic each year. His proposal was a Trojan horse: persuade mining companies to extract those metals from the river water itself, funding remediation through the act of removal. At a section of the river known as Copper Liquor, vivid green with dissolved copper sulphate an iron water grate salvaged from a Barcelona skip, engraved with the words 'Potable Water', was submerged over several days. In the acidic solution, an ancient alchemical process called cementation took place: iron dissolved into the river and copper precipitated in its place, removing one of freshwater's most toxic metals with each cycle. The recovered copper was refined in the studio and electroplated onto one and two cent coins low value currency found on pavements, deemed not worth pocketing. Since 1993, the EU has spent an estimated 3 billion euros producing coins whose manufacturing cost exceeds their face value. Commercially viable copper deposits may be depleted within decades. At that point, the waste streams, the tailings dams, the acid rivers, the discarded coins will become the mines.

Strange Powers closes 13.6.26. Seventh Gallery, Collingwood.


📷 Meg de Young

11/06/2026

05/06/2026

Strange Powers closes 13.6.26. Seventh Gallery, Collingwood.