Australia’s leading organisation dedicated to commissioning, exhibiting, and touring contemporary art driven by ideas and shaped by technology- launches its latest national touring exhibition, Experimenta Emergence, at Noosa Regional Gallery on 14 June.
Two weeks ahead of this year’s Floating Land Biennale, Experimenta Emergence is a timely exhibition featuring 13 artworks by leading Australian and international artists across diverse art forms, including screen-based works, installations, robotics, participatory, and generative art. The exhibition intertwines the work of leading contemporary artists, including Sunshine Coast-based sound artist and UniSC Discipline Lead of Design, Dr Leah Barclay; Brisbane-based visual artist and QUT Senior Lecturer Daniel McKewan; and Australian designer, director, and BAFTA-nominated producer Liam Young.
In a nod to this year’s Floating Land theme, Escape Making, the 17 artists of Experimenta Emergence critically examine our world, encouraging us to question our shifting realities, while reflecting upon how we might navigate emerging societal dynamics and environmental changes.
Says Curator Lubi Thomas, “The artworks these Australian and international artists have created – virtual realities, participatory works, and speculative fictions – will provoke you to question our shifting realities. What are the forces shaping our world? How might we encounter, counter, or adapt to the transformations of the human and more-than-human world we are part of? Can we alter current trajectories?”
With a global reputation for high-quality curated programming, Experimenta commissions new work from some of the world’s most adventurous contemporary artists working at the periphery of convention: the intersection of art, technology, and society. Now undertaking its 9th national tour, Experimenta fearlessly supports ambitious projects and complex ideas, offering audiences multiple entry points to access and experience these.
Floating Land Curator and Noosa Regional Gallery Director Michael Brennan confirms this year’s Biennale, Floating Land: Escape Making, echoes similar sentiments, with artists “responding to a provocation that riffs off the social climate of the time.”
Positioning art in public places so that it’s “encountered by people who don’t always seek this kind of thing out”, Brennan furthers that the Biennale uses the physical location as “part of its material – part of its story.”
Examining what it is to be human in the age of technological acceleration, Experimenta Emergence will tour Australia from 2025 to 2027, with Noosa Regional Gallery as the launching point, a fitting preamble for the 13th iteration of Noosa’s celebrated art in nature event, Floating Land.
Experimenta Emergence: National tour of media arts will run from 14 Jun to 17 August. Entry to the exhibition is free. Visit noosaregionalgallery.com.au
Meet the curator at the opening event on Saturday 14 June, 3-6pm. Opening speeches will be Auslan interpreted; local audiovisual artist Fin Wegener will be performing. Free tickets via the gallery website.
Floating Land: Escape Making will run from 28 Jun to 27 Jul 2025. For more information: floatingland.org.au
