On Saturday 4 October, the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) opened a triple bill marking the fourth and final quarter of its fiftieth-anniversary artistic program. Across video, sculpture, photography, painting, and film, the current exhibitions navigate extraction, extremis, and extravagance.

Wiradjuri artist Joel Sherwood Spring combines a First Nations critical perspective with an interest in the logic and ethos of techocapitalism. In 2023, at the Institute of Modern Art, he won the Churchie with Diggermode, an audacious two-channel video essay which explores the world mining has made. Mining—in various forms—was its subject and process.

Sherwood Spring returns to the Institute of Modern Art with his sequel Diggermode 2: Cloud Ceding. The video-installation project combines documentary and narrative filmmaking; archival materials, 3D-generated simulations, and sculptural elements. The work revolves around Kira, a drone operator at RAAF Edinburgh, who has just bought a Defence Housing Australia house in Northwest Quarter Estate in Adelaide’s Angle Park. Traversing soldier-settlement histories, land-title registration, lifestyle vlogging, and data-centre real-estate monopolies, Diggermode 2 considers how Australia’s strategic position in the Pacific secures future rare-earth extraction. 

Diggermode 2 is a joint project with the 2026 Adelaide Biennial. It has been curated by Ellie Buttrose and Robert Leonard, and supported by Creative Australia, the Keir Foundation, and IMA Commissioners Circle.

Confronting Femininity will showcase three Brisbane women artists of different generations who present femininity in extremis: Rosemary Laing (1959–2024), Natalya Hughes (1977–), and Michaela Stark (1994–). Curated by Dr Sal Edwards and IMA Director Robert Leonard, the exhibition brings together works which both confront familiar western conceptions of femininity and make femininity confronting.

Rosemary Laing’s photographic series A Dozen Useless Actions for Grieving Blondes (2009), presents interchangeable beautiful but fraught blondes, recalling Hollywood starlets or fashion models. Natalya Hughes’ new paintings, addressing the Parisian fashion illustrator and costume designer Erté (Romaine de Tirtoff), embrace, endorse, and extend his adventures in hyperfemininity. Michaela Stark confronts feminine body norms, positioning her own body at the centre of her critique.

“Confronting Femininity offers an intergenerational reckoning with the reductive norms of western femininity. Laing, Hughes and Stark abstract, exaggerate and co-opt codes of hyperfemininity, illuminating the reality, and absurdity, of living in a cultural moment that critiques femininity, while simultaneously expecting women and femmes to conform to its norms.” – Sal Edwards

Our screening room hosts Toshio Matsumoto’s New Wave feature film, Funeral Parade of Roses (1969). Loosely adapted from Oedipus Rex, the film explores the underground gay scene of 1960s Tokyo, with its drag bars and coquettish divas; fuzz guitars and performance art; booze, drugs, and mascara.

Transgender actor Peter (Shinnosuke Ikehata) gives an astonishing performance as Eddie, a hostess at Bar Genet, caught in a violent love triangle with reigning drag queen Leda for the attention of the club’s owner Gonda. The nonlinear narrative is interspersed with documentary-style interviews with cast members about their sexuality and identity. 

Breathtakingly inventive, Matsumoto’s first feature film has been described as a ‘shattering kaleidoscopic masterpiece’, and ‘one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s’.

The final quarter of our fiftieth-anniversary artistic program will be on show at the Institute of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane from October 4–December 21.

The Institute of Modern Art is Australia’s oldest contemporary art space. For fifty years, it’s been where people gather to have big discussions about art and the world. Located in Fortitude Valley—a stone’s throw from the iconic James Street precinct—the IMA is easily accessible by public transport. Our world-class exhibitions are always free.