1990s Re-look: When the IMA was truly located in the vernacular here and now: an institution for the people not the elite…
You Are Here was a foundational 1992 Queer group exhibition staged at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane, co-curated by artist Luke Roberts and artist collaborator Scott Redford. It was Australia’s first institutional gallery exhibition to feature exclusively gay male artists during the height of the AIDS crisis. A cultural moment when reshaping healthcare systems, advancing patient rights, and accelerating medical research was paramount, and a queer temporality when radical approaches to artmaking and LGBTQIA+ activism. A queer temporalty when the HIV/AIDS pandemic provided artists with a powerful conduit for political activism, social critique, and community strengthening in an ongoing project of resistance to erasure, discrimination and symbolic annhilation. It was a period that transformed creative expression into an urgent tool to fight stigma, demand institutional resources, and document human survival. HIV/AIDs is not over, and this work and ethos continues to shape and inform a continuity of action by creatives, collectives and archival art projects which produce artworks and resources that archive trauma, pleasure and lived experience despite adversity across queer time.
YOU ARE HERE
Artists including Bashir Baraki, Leonard Brown, Peter Cooley, JUan Davila, Brent Harris, Mathew Jones, David McDiarmid, Scott Redford, Luke Roberts, Hiram To, Peter Tully, Ross Wallace.
A core focus was a collective exploration of queer identity, queer desire, pleasure and the political lived realities of sexuality, temporality, and health.system.
It’s legacy is ongoing. For example aspects of this large-scale foundational exhibition were commemorated decades later by the small-scale 2025 ‘follow-up exhibition’ . You Are Here Too was staged at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane Magandjin from April 12 to June 29, 2025
Here Not There. Exhibition Catalogue.
Here Not There was a group exhibition staged at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane from August 6 to August 28, 1993. In part as a mode for advocating and amplifying Asian Australian artists and artist groupings and as a form of institutional critique. Specifically, a critique of institutions including QAGOMA and their mainstream APT event for not including and erasing local artists.
Exhibition co-curators: Artist-Curator Hiram To and IMA Director Curator Nicholas Tsoutas.
Presented at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and later at Umbrella Studios in Townsville.Featured Asian Australian Artists included Steven Alderton, Vicente Butron, Maria Cruz, Simryn Gill, Felicia Khan, Robert Nery, and Laurens Tan.Catalogue texts included contributions by artist authors Hiram To, May Lam, Robert Nery, and Fazal Rizvi.