Creative Antarctica: Australian Artists and Writers in the Far South brings together over 35 artists, including Melbourne locals, grappling with one of Earth's most remote places.
Opening across two venues — RMIT Gallery and Design Hub Gallery — the exhibition sits at a genuinely compelling intersection of art, climate, and human experience.
Antarctica is a place most Australians will never visit, yet it’s undergoing some of the most dramatic environmental shifts on the planet. Creative Antarctica makes the case that artists and writers have a critical role to play in translating that transformation for the rest of us.
Creative Antarctica: Australian Artists and Writers in the Far South isn’t just a collection of pretty icy landscapes. It’s a multifaceted response to a continent that resists easy understanding; politically, ecologically, emotionally.
With new site-specific installations sitting alongside historically significant works, the show spans decades of artistic engagement with the Far South, asking how creative practice can expand our sense of what Antarctica means and what we stand to lose.
Creative Antarctica: Australian Artists and Writers in the Far South
- Where: RMIT Gallery and Design Hub Gallery, Melbourne
- When: 20 February – 2 May 2026
- Cost: Free
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The exhibition draws on the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship, a program that embeds artists and writers in one of the world’s most extreme environments. RMIT’s Professor Philip Samartzis — lead curator of the project — has spoken to why this kind of funding matters: science can measure Antarctica, but art interprets it, and he says we need both to grasp the urgency of what’s unfolding at the bottom of the world.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Dr Polly Stanton, a senior lecturer in RMIT’s School of Media and Communication, who has described the fellowship as existing in a category of its own, much like the continent itself. Antarctica has a way of stripping away the non-essential, she’s noted, leaving artists with something fundamental about their work and their place in the world. That quality comes through in the exhibition.
Artists involved include James Batchelor, Lawrence English, Janet Laurence, Sidney Nolan, Frank Hurley, Bea Maddock, Martin Walch, and many others, a roster that spans generations and disciplines, united by the strange gravity Antarctica exerts on creative practice.
Alongside the exhibition, Philip Samartzis performs Air Pressure at The Capitol on 27 February; a free live show developed in dialogue with Berlin-based artist Michael Vorfeld. D
rawing on Samartzis’s long-term polar fieldwork, the performance transforms environmental field recordings into a spatial sonic experience, foregrounding the elemental forces of wind, pressure, and acoustic resistance. Rather than illustrating Antarctica, it invites audiences to encounter it as an active, physical presence.
If you’re even vaguely curious about experimental sound, it’s worth showing up for.
Air Pressure
- Where: The Capitol, 113 Swanston St, Melbourne
- When: 27 February, 8:00pm – 9:00pm
- Cost: Free
Creative Antarctica was produced as part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project and is supported by a wider program of talks, panels, and workshops running throughout the exhibition period; all free, all public.
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