Next date: Saturday, 11 October 2025 | 10:00 AM
to Saturday, 14 February 2026 | 04:00 PM
Arranging by chance is a collaborative exhibition that builds on the artists’ research into family trees, queerness, toxicity and healing. It considers the family tree as a symbolic and botanical form, positioning it in relation to ‘pharmakon’—the idea that a poison is also a remedy.
The artists draw from three key sites: a decommissioned NuFarm Factory in Fawkner, a childhood property and ex-banana plantation in Northern NSW, and the AIDS Memorial Garden outside the old Infectious Diseases Hospital in Fairfield. These sites of toxicity, death and contamination are places they are compelled to write, care and make from. As queer parents, the artists share a commitment to interrogating the linear structure of genealogy and the impact of industry on various ecologies.
Arranging by chance borrows its title from a line in Some Trees, a poem by John Ashbury, to suggest a queer reading the artists’ relationships to these logics and sites. The exhibition will incorporate new and existing works spanning drawing, installation, photography, audio and written texts.
About the artists
Abbra Kotlarczyk was raised on bundjalung Country in the subtropical ruins of a decommissioned banana plantation. As an artist and a writer, she works with paper as a foundational medium, exploring its potential to hold and express story and interspecies subjectivity. Her work is research-driven and situated through expanded notions of care, labour, queerness, ecology, publication and embodied poetics.
Briony Galligan was born on palawa Country and has lived in Naarm for most of her life. She makes environments—through drawing, installation and sculpture—that are slippery and suspended, more atmosphere than coherent logic. Briony positions objects as conduits, working with them as tools and appendages to move through states of disequilibrium such as sickness, queerness and invasiveness.