Meanjin/Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA) plays a critical role in setting the agenda for contemporary art in Australia through significant investment in the state’s artists. Today, the IMA is pleased to announce the artistic cohort of Platform 2027, its esteemed early-career professional-development project. The artist recipients are Amanda Bennetts, Adam Cole, Savannah Jarvis, Daniel Sherington, and Prita Tina Yeganeh. 

Established in 2024, Platform is a career-development program with proven impact on the profile and capacity building of Queensland’s emerging artists. The program provides early-career Queensland artists with a significant solo exhibition commission. Artists will be guided to realise their most ambitious body of work to date with support from the IMA’s curatorial team, Director Robert Leonard, Assistant Director Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer, and Programs Manager Madeline Brewer. 

Leonard says: ‘The IMA has always operated as a talent spotter, bringing new artists and new ideas to public attention, discovering the Biennale artists of tomorrow. With the support of our patrons and Creative Australia’s Plus1 program, Platform 2027 promises to be our biggest Platform exhibition to date. We’re excited’. 

Amanda Bennetts’ work is grounded in lived experience of chronic illness and disability. Drawing on clinical and wellness aesthetics, she positions the body as a critical site of inquiry, exploring how illness, health, and wellness are mediated by culture, technology, and infrastructure. 

Adam Cole works with common construction-industry processes and materials to explore precarious structures, and the relationship between the body and architecture. He creates forms where containment falters and perception is unsettled, evoking instability, decay, and transformation.  

Savannah Jarvis investigates the visual politics of chronic nociplastic pain, drawing on pain neuroscience, reparative aesthetics, and narrative medicine to develop non-catastrophic visual systems of representation.

Daniel Sherington takes aim at art-world systems and structures. His humourous, passive-aggressive work combines digital production and traditional means of execution, complicating the personal, the institutional, and the art-historical. 

Prita Tina Yeganeh explores the fractured emotional and physical geographies of displacement. Drawing on Iranian sensibilities and traditional craft, alongside ecological systems thinking, she investigates the politics of land, (re)turn, guesthood, community, and belonging.  

Platform 2027 is generously supported by Creative Australia’s Plus1 Matched Funding and many private patrons, collectively fundraising $100,000 toward the program. Funds will cover artist fees, production costs, installation, marketing and promotion, an exhibition publication, and the provision of free educational and public programs. The exhibition will be on display at the IMA from January to March 2027.