The Institute of Modern Art (IMA) has today announced its ambitious 2024 Artistic Program, alongside a new team of curatorial voices.

For the first time in its nearly fifty-year history, the IMA has appointed a team of Adjunct Curators to inject diverse perspectives and expertise into its world-class exhibitions and programs. The IMA has appointed Stephanie Berlangieri, Shannon Brett, and queer art-history collective Kink (Amelia Barikin, Courtney Coombs, Callum McGrath, Spiros Panigirakis, and Tim Riley Walsh) to lend their curatorial acumen to the gallery’s programming in 2024 and 2025.

Australia’s oldest independent contemporary art space, the IMA continues to be at the forefront of artist development and presentation and is a key pillar of Queensland’s art ecology. The gallery’s upcoming program supports artistic evolution and is underscored by truth and dialogue, exploring Queensland’s hidden histories and the currents of contemporary culture. It features major new commissions by Australian artists.

The program begins in Summer with Darug/Sydney-based artist Justine Youssef’s multi-sensory exhibition, Somewhat Eternal. Through video and installation, text and scent, Youssef explores familial knowledges, narratives, and rituals. The exhibition expands to consider the broader political and social currents of occupation, both in her family’s village in Lebanon and in Australia, exploring the impacts of displacement and our complicity in causing it.

Presented alongside Youssef’s exhibition is Los Angeles-based artist Arthur Jafa’s seminal video, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. In just a few minutes, the roller-coaster video encapsulates African American experience as a tale of resilience. Featuring footage shot by the Golden Lion–winning artist and clips from films, newscasts, and citizen videos, it shuffles scenes of racism, grief, and routine police violence with scenes of joy, defiance, and creativity. Set to Kanye West’s emotional gospel anthem ‘Ultralight Beam’, it is a poignant, visceral meditation on African American life and identity.

In Autumn, Jasmine Togo-Brisby presents a new exhibition examining the Pacific slave trade and its impact on those who trace their roots to Australia through its practices, colloquially known as ‘blackbirding’. An Australian-South Sea Islander, Togo-Brisby conjures with an iconography of tall ships, decorative ceilings, and crow feathers, exploring this lesser-known side of Australia’s colonial history. A new sculpture will seep from the gallery’s ceiling in a return of the repressed, and a new video will reflect on the treacherous sea journeys taken by tens of thousands of South Sea Islanders to Australia in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Presented alongside Togo-Brisby’s exhibition is the first instalment in the gallery’s annual Queensland-artist exhibition series. Platform will showcase new work by artists under forty, who were born, live, or lived in Queensland, and have not yet had a major solo exhibition in a public gallery. In 2024, Platform showcases new sculptures by Miguel Aquilizan, new paintings by Mia Boe, and christens Sarah Poulgrain’s houseboat.

In Winter, the IMA presents a new group exhibition, Duty of Care. In the art world and beyond, ‘care’ is a buzzword, used to reframe and reset policy and practice. Featuring works by over thirty nationally and internationally renowned artists, it explores the complexities of ‘care’. Featuring artists with diverse lived experiences and art practices, it explores institutional care, professional care, care and race, care as obligation, care and healing, and more. Presented in partnership with Griffith University Art Museum, it encompasses two simultaneous exhibitions and a one-day symposium.

In Spring, Brisbane-based artist James Barth presents a major new solo exhibition The Clumped Spirit with the support of Copyright Agency Partnerships, an annual $80,000 commission supporting mid-career and established artists to develop career-defining new work. Barth’s practice is grounded in questions of self representation, using 3D world-building technology to create stages, props, and avatars in her likeness. From these, she assembles digital compositions, which are animated into videos and transmuted into oil paintings.

Throughout the year, the gallery’s Screening Room will exhibit videos by Hong Kong-based artist Angela Su, Singaporean artist Dawn Ng, and more. With new extended opening hours and more exhibitions, the IMA is repositioning itself a vibrant hub for world-class experiences and discussions of contemporary art and culture.

Alongside its ambitious program of new and seminal work, the IMA will launch an expanded public engagement program. Joining Mono, the IMA’s longstanding program of experimental sound curated by Lawrence English, is a new series of events presented in partnership with leading artistic and community figures.

‘We’re excited to present more exhibitions, commissions, and public programs by artists from Australia and the world. Our 2024 program—and our new team of Adjunct Curators—marks the beginning of a new era for the IMA, positioning us as a hub for diverse curatorial inquiry and rich discussions on contemporary art and society’, said IMA Director Robert Leonard.

Explore the 2024 Artistic Program here and learn more about the IMA’s new Adjunct Curators here.