The exhibition seeks to foster new encounters and perspectives, highlighting the power of art and literature to transform human awareness of the South Polar region.
The exhibition examines the role artists and writers play in expanding the Antarctic imaginary, offering new understandings of one of the world’s most remote and fragile wilderness zones.
Creative Antarctica features work by over 35 artists including new, site-specific installations as well as historically significant artworks, and is supported by a rich suite of talks, panels and workshops that provide a variety of engagement opportunities and modes of encounter with the Far South.
Creative Antarctica demonstrates how artists and writers play an increasingly vital role in observing and recording the tensions between climate, landscape, technology, politics and humans.
This exhibition was produced as part of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project Creative Antarctica: Australian Artists and Writers in the Far South, in collaboration with project team members.
Lead Curator: Philip Samartzis
Artists include James Batchelor, David Bridie, Maria Buchner, David Burrows, Stephen Eastaugh, Lawrence English, Kirsten Haydon, William Hodges, Frank Hurley, Nicholas Hutcheson, Keith Jack, Leila Jeffreys, John Kelly, Janet Laurence, Nel Law, Phillip Law, Alison Lester, Sue Lovegrove, Bea Maddock, Douglas Mawson, John McCormick, Adam Nash, Miranda Nieboer, David Neilson, Sidney Nolan, Lin Onus, Charles Page, Judith Parrott, Christian Clare Robertson, Sally Robinson, Philip Samartzis, Jörg Schmeisser, Jan Senbergs, Polly Stanton, Charles Turnbull Harrisson, K. Verell, Martin Walch, and Sean Williams.
Thumbnail image: David Neilson, Cartographer Noel Ward inspecting dog line in blizzard, Mawson Station, East Antarctica, December 1990, 1990. Image courtesy of the artist.
This exhibition is presented by RMIT University across both RMIT Gallery and Design Hub Gallery.
11am - 5pm Tuesday to Friday
12pm - 4pm Saturday
Closed on public holidays
Chloe Rose Thomas’ exhibition, 'Can I Hold You?' centres on queer community and embodied practices of care, exploring what it means to take traditional photographic portraits of non-normative bodies and the histories they represent.
'Portable Stillness' (2025), is an ongoing spatial installation that explores how the making of miniature objects and floating altar-like displays can express memory, collection, and the domestic in transition. Motivated by the instability of diasporic living and continual relocation, Ko Jou Chen constructs handmade structures that carry memory and presence across her shifting environments.
'Slip' is a practice-led research project that explores the poetic qualities of the bluestones that have been discarded in recent construction works around RMIT University. Through the process of moulding and casting these stones into beeswax, Noah Bridger hopes to reimagine Melbourne’s urban landscape.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
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