Canberra Contemporary Photographic Prize
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Exhibition and competition celebrating both emerging and established talents in photo media.
Dark Matter 2026:
Louise Curham, Lucy Foster, Sophie Gabrielle, Siying Zhou
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photo access
Dark Matter 2026 presents outcomes from our annual residency program supporting artists working with darkroom-based and alternative photographic processes. The program fosters experimentation and the development of innovative image-based practice, encouraging participants to expand the possibilities of analogue methods. Across the residency cycle, artists produce new work that responds to the urgencies and complexities of the present moment.
Exhibition artists
Louise Curham
Louise Curham has been working with analogue film since finding darkrooms in New Zealand in 1990. During film school in Melbourne in the early 1990s, Louise moved through narrative film and dance film to find her way to experimental film and expanded cinema. In the late 1990s, she studied painting at TAFE while active with cross disciplinary artists in Aphids. Louise was also active in the Melbourne Super8 Group, participating in one of the last Super8 festivals in Yarraville. Those strands of liveness and DIY politics of super 8 brought Louise to expanded cinema in a Master of Fine Arts at COFA in Sydney (2000-2004). During this time the collaboration Teaching and Learning Cinema with Lucas Ihlein was forged, work that continues. Through 2006-8 Louise was active in Sydney’s experimental music scene before a move to Canberra in 2009. Working often in galleries since then, highlights include PhotoAccess 2015 and 2019 and the Canberra Art Biennial 2022 and 2024. Most recently Louise and Teaching and Learning Cinema contributed to Light Source at Drill Hall Gallery, 2025.
Lucy Foster
Lucy Foster is an experimental lens-based artist residing in Naarm/Melbourne. Her practice explores the boundaries of photography through expanded photo techniques, collage and darkroom interventions. She has exhibited locally and internationally and works alongside other artists as a photographer. This merging of personal and professional practice strengthens a deep interest in the image and its capacity to shape experiences of time and memory. Working meditatively in the darkroom, Lucy employs techniques such as writing with light or masking out areas of exposure. This space of play welcomes unpredictability, allowing chance happenings to become as meaningful as any memorised or controlled gesture.
Siying Zhou
Born in China, Siying Zhou is a visual artist whose practice draws upon her Chinese heritage and social status as an Asian female immigrant in the West. Through producing predominantly installation works, Siying uses spatial structure and materiality of various media, such as, video, photography, performance, drawings and text, to undertake her research about cultural difference and cultural representation, and to create discussions about ontological issues about Asian immigrants and epistemological experiences formed in the visual art. Siying’s artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally and also included in private collections. She obtained her Master of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Art, the University of Melbourne, in 2018. She is the winner of Linden Art Prize 2019.
Sophie Gabrielle
Sophie Gabrielle (she/they) is a contemporary photographer living and working on the lands of the Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri peoples. Their practice incorporates biomaterials, photographic archives and the human body to examine the relationships between photography, memory, history and psychological experience. Gabrielle’s work has been exhibited internationally, including in Australia, Malaysia, The Netherlands, France, Germany, South Korea, the United States and the United Kingdom. Their commissions include The New Yorker’s Fiction Issue (2021), cover artwork for the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra’s Die Seejungfrau (2020), and photobook and album collaboration Through a Vulnerable Occur with Seabuckthorn produced alongside by IKKII. Gabrielle is a Foam Talent recipient (2018) and winner of the Open Doors Photographic Prize (2024). They were a founding member of Good Moon Rising, a Naarm-based collective supporting gender-diverse artists. Gabrielle holds a Master of Arts Management from RMIT and a Bachelor of Photography (Fine Art).
Upcoming exhibitions
LUCKY ROCKET:
Yani Clarke
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LUCKY ROCKET follows Yani Clarke’s return after the 2022 floods, revisiting Bun Bang Fai rocket festivals to explore place, ritual, and resilience.
Halfway Seen Halfway Home (半窥半归) :
Guylieuzy (Ming Liew & Will Wang)
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A moving-image exhibition exploring Chinese–Australian hybrid identity shaped by migration, memory and cultural negotiation.