This Summer at ACCA, Two Landmark Exhibitions Look to History To Redraw the Future

This summer, ACCA presents two solo shows concurrently for the first time – and each one, in its own way, marks a significant milestone. Tourmaline: Transcendent, curated by Sophie Prince, is the first solo exhibition in Australia of work by American artist, activist, filmmaker and author, Tourmaline, whose works have been shown at the Tate Modern in London and both the Met and Moma in New York. Presented in dialogue, the gallery also presents r e a: c l a i m e d, curated by ACCA artistic director and CEO, Myles Russell-Cook. This focused survey includes the first retrospective monograph of the iconoclastic Gamilaraay, Wailwan and Biripi digital media artist r e a.

Although the artists’ trajectories are distinct – Tourmaline, named among Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2020, made her name in New York, while the work of r e a, who’s based in central New South Wales and the Blue Mountains, was shaped by the colonial legacies of Australia – the parallels are striking. Both use video and photography to explore and reconfigure queer, Black/Blak and postcolonial identities. Both engage deeply with history, sifting through archives in search of narratives that have been forgotten or marginalised. Both are gender-nonconforming and have made the politics of sex and gender a key theme of their work – a focus that ACCA embraces.

“We’re particularly aware of the urgency of discussing trans issues at the moment, with the rise in discrimination against [trans] communities globally,” Prince says.

Tourmaline’s work has a particularly keen focus on queer liberation struggles and trans resilience. Her art practice is rooted in the advocacy work she began in her early twenties as a community organiser, campaigning for prison abolition, racial equality and LGBTQIA+ rights with groups including Fierce and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. She first came to prominence as an archivist of New York’s queer liberation movement and is largely responsible for transforming figures like Marsha P Johnson – the revolutionary trans activist best known for her role in the Stonewall riots of 1969 – from historical footnote to pop cultural icon. This year she published Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P Johnson, the first authoritative biography of Johnson to date, and the culmination of more than two decades of research.

Transcendent, Prince says, comes at “a quintessential moment for Tourmaline”, just as she has released her book on Johnson, naturally, informing and inspiring the “really definitive, resolved aspects of her new and recent work”. Set across two rooms in ACCA’s atrium gallery, the exhibition features two new commissions. Transcendent series (2022–2025) is a suite of self-portraits shot in Venice, with the artist styled by long-term collaborator Claire Sullivan (who has also styled Charlie XCX and Lady Gaga), exploring Black trans beauty, leisure and presence. Presented in its own cinema space and making its global premiere, A Flower That Lives Forever (2025) is a video work specially commissioned by ACCA that reimagines a joyful outing Johnson took with her friends on the Staten Island Ferry. There will also be an intimate, Australian-first screening of Pollinator (2022), which most recently showed at the 2024 Whitney Biennale. The film weaves together archival recordings of Johnson’s memorial procession through the West Village; camcorder footage of the artist’s late father, the unionist and activist George Gossett; and staged scenes in which a garlanded Tourmaline wanders through the Brooklyn Museum and Botanic Garden.

As an activist and historian, Tourmaline is invested in the elasticity of time. For her, Prince explains, “history has a ripple effect. There is a transcendence of time and history into the present moment.” Our actions extend backwards, linking up with the forebears who inspire and empower us, and forward into the futures we shape.

r e a also deals with the interpenetration of past and future, through discomfiting works that translate archival materials into new media, forcing repressed colonial histories to the surface. r e a: c l a i m e d, which takes over three gallery spaces, is something of a full-circle moment for the artist, who exhibited more than 30 years ago as an early-career artist in ACCA’s era-defining group show Blakness: Blak City Culture! The nationally touring exhibition opened at ACCA in 1994, and captured the nascent Indigenous new-media art movement: an impressive cohort of young, city-based artists, including Destiny Deacon and Brook Andrew. Their irreverent works, produced far from the established art centres of Central Australia and the Western Desert, sought to redefine perceptions of First Nations identity and artmaking, transporting it from the realm of history and anthropology to the cutting edge of contemporary culture.

“Blakness was a watershed exhibition within the contemporary urban Indigenous art landscape,” Prince says. “It identified and made public a cohort of artists who were practising in a way that defied the homogenous representation of what First Nations art, and First Nations people, can look like.”

Most of the artists who took part in Blakness “have since gone on to have major institutional solo exhibitions. r e a would probably be one of the few who haven’t yet had that expansive presentation of their work”. Although widely recognised within the art world as one of the country’s foremost new media artists, this focused survey brings a new level of mainstream awareness to their practice. In many ways, it is a reclamation of their rightful place in Australian art history. “r e a has been due for this moment for a long time now,” Prince says.

Their work is intended to challenge. A descendant of the Stolen Generations, r e a draws on their family history of domestic servitude, often implicating the viewer in scenes charged with foreboding and latent violence. The newly commissioned sound and video installation tRAKa-tRAKn (burra bee dee) (2024–25)– an exhibition highlight five years in the making – begins with the traditional Gamilaraay ancestral story of burra be edee, or flying foxes. As in r e a’s 2009 series PolesApart, perhaps their best-known body of work (spanning video and photography), the protagonist is fleeing some unseen horror to speak to the process of colonisation as both a literal and omnipresent pursuit. In tRAKa-tRAKn you watch the central figures’ progress through a sniper’s lens; the hunter, it seems, is you. The work, Prince says, “is very much about the issue of disproportionate youth suicide amongst First Nations peoples” – an ominous burden for the community to bear, made worse by its unpredictability. But there’s a redemptive quality to tRAKa-tRAKn, too. The flying foxes represent First Nations ancestors, following protectively overhead. It is about the importance of young people healing on Country. “It’s like a calling to arms – for the ancestors to rally and for community to gather together.”

Here, r e a looks to cultural stories as a source of survival and resistance, just as Tourmaline summons the spirit of Marsha P. Johnson to project images of queer joy and prosperity. Each offers their take on history as a challenge to the viewer, but also an invitation to become pollinators and help seed an alternative collective future.

Tourmaline: Transcendent and r e a: c l a i m e d run from Friday December 12, 2025, to Sunday March 15, 2026. Entry is free.

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