Make a Scene: Fashioning Queer Identity and Club Culture in the 90s
Hello! SEQ ARIs, artist cooperatives and collectives have been making scenes in Brisbane Magandjin since the 1940s. This is a vitally important and enduring community and cultural engagement activity for many reasons, including a timeless process of troubling the persistence of heteronormative oppression in Queensland and its institutions. Queering is a critical and necessary ongoing project in Queensland/Australia. It is an important attribute of my rolling and expanding artwork; an internet artwork accessed at ariremix.com.au.
Queensland Museum is actively addressing the lack of major queer exhibitions in Queensland over many many decades through a queer fashion, design, and pop culture lens: Make a Scene: Fashioning Queer Identity and Club Culture in the 90s.
Great to play a small part in this fabulous and inclusive QM exhibition process. Opening September 5, 2025. All kudos to curator colleague Chris Salter and an amazing QM team. Queer-trans LGBTQIA+ arts-based activity in conservative places like Queensland is always a human rights concern.
In the 1990s, a vibrant and creative underground nightclub and dance party scene emerged in Brisbane for LGBTQIA+ people and their allies – safe places to wear fabulous fashions that celebrated the community’s diversity and reflected a fearless self-expression of identity.
Coinciding with the 35th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality, this original exhibition by Queensland Museum brings together fashion, pop culture and LGBTQIA+ lived experience. Featuring extraordinary pieces from the museum’s costume and fashion collections, Make a Scene will reveal untold stories of Queensland’s LGBTQIA+ communities and illuminate key moments from this period of Brisbane’s history.
This astonishing and must-see exhibition portends a symbolically transformative phenomenon Queensland/ Australia-wide for many decades to come: