A SECOND BUILDING, A DIFFERENT QUESTION.

There is a particular kind of institutional moment — not common, but recognisable in retrospect — when a gallery stops being a repository and becomes a proposition. When the building itself is an argument about what art can do in a democratic public life. When the architecture, the program, the civic ambition and the historical timing converge into something that cannot be dismissed as infrastructure alone.

When the Gallery of Modern Art opened on 2 December 2006, it became Australia’s largest gallery of modern and contemporary art. That is a fact of scale. But the more consequential fact is what the institution represented at the time of its opening: Queensland’s decision to make a structural, publicly funded claim that contemporary art — the art of living artists, of unresolved ideas, of regional perspectives not yet canonised by international markets — deserved its own dedicated home. Not an annexe. Not a temporary wing. A building.

Queensland was the first Australian state gallery to have a second building devoted to contemporary art, and GOMA is often cited as a catalyst for a cultural shift in Brisbane and Queensland. The reputation of the Asia Pacific Triennial, already successful, was boosted and its attendance shot into the hundreds of thousands. The shift was not merely symbolic. It was institutional, spatial and demographic. A new kind of audience walked through doors that had not previously existed.

The Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art — collectively known as QAGOMA, and addressable in the onchain civic namespace as qagoma.queensland — did not acquire its authority overnight. It was the product of a much longer arc: a nineteenth-century state gallery, decades of collecting under constraint, a gradual reorientation toward the art of Australia’s own region, and then the arrival of a building large enough to hold the ambition that the institution had already demonstrated it possessed.

THE LONG ROAD TO KURILPA POINT.

The institution now known as QAGOMA has roots stretching back to 1895. In the late nineteenth century, Queensland artists Isaac Walter Jenner and R. Godfrey Rivers successfully lobbied for the creation of a state art gallery, which began life as the Queensland National Art Gallery in 1895. The gallery was opened by the Queensland Governor, Sir Henry Wylie Norman, at temporary premises in the old Town Hall on Queen Street. The inaugural display included 38 pictures, one marble bust, and 70 engravings.

For most of its early existence, the Gallery occupied borrowed and temporary spaces — a pattern that speaks to both the institution’s persistence and Queensland’s fitful cultural self-confidence during much of the twentieth century. It occupied a series of temporary premises prior to the opening of its permanent home at Brisbane’s South Bank in 1982. The Queensland Art Gallery building opened on 21 June 1982, designed by architect Robin Gibson AO, and won the Sir Zelman Cowan Award for Architecture.

That 1982 building — low, measured, riverine in its sensibility — gave the institution civic permanence for the first time. But it was designed for a different era’s understanding of what a public gallery should do. By the mid-1990s, something was already changing. The establishment of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition series in 1993 forged a focus on the artwork of the region and created a case for a second building to display a growing contemporary collection.

The inaugural Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1993 was the first project of its kind in the world to focus on the contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific. In undertaking the Triennial, the Gallery recognised the need for an ongoing series of exhibitions and forums which initiated dialogue on the art of this important geo-political region. The argument for GOMA was thus not invented from above by bureaucrats, but forced upward by curatorial ambition and by the sheer volume of art that the Triennial was generating — art that needed space to breathe.

The ambition and success of the APT series convinced government supporters that the show needed its own modern gallery to do it justice. Queensland Art Gallery was the first state gallery in the country to have a second building for contemporary art. The decision to build was political in the deepest sense: it required sustained advocacy, the alignment of state priorities, and the willingness to commit substantial public funds to an institution whose constituency — the audience for contemporary art — was not yet fully formed.

THE MILLENNIUM ARTS PROJECT AND THE MAKING OF GOMA.

The Queensland Government championed the creation of GOMA in the early 2000s, allocating $260 million from the 1999 State Budget to position Queensland as a cultural and creative hub. In May 2000, Premier Peter Beattie and Arts Minister Matt Foley announced an international design competition for the new gallery, which would include a Cinémathèque as a core feature, along with production facilities and a media gallery, establishing a model for integrating cinema into an art museum.

From over 170 submissions across 24 countries, Sydney-based firm Architectus, in association with Davenport Campbell and Partners, was selected in July 2002. The commission went to Kerry and Lindsay Clare — Queensland-born architects who had moved south to found Architectus — and their design became itself a statement about where Brisbane sat in its own estimation.

Designed by architects Kerry and Lindsay Clare of Architectus, GOMA’s architecture emphasises a subtropical responsiveness with expansive, light-filled spaces that integrate indoor galleries with outdoor public areas, earning the 2007 Royal Australian Institute of Architects National Award for Public Architecture. The building was not imposed on its site but calibrated to it. Whilst the rest of Brisbane’s cultural precinct is characterised by buildings arranged parallel to the Brisbane River, the Gallery of Modern Art is placed perpendicular to the river. This strong gesture led to several urbanistic effects. It created a public plaza fronting Stanley Street, allowed the new gallery to form a stronger relationship to the Queensland Art Gallery, created a sheltered outdoor public space near the river, and formed an enlarged public park at Kurilpa Point.

The architects described their intent with notable civic clarity:

"The duality of the design approach is that the architecture is impressive and monumental without losing its openness and freshness, and without being intimidating; international yet responsive to local conditions and the south-east Queensland context. By adopting this approach the architects propose to realise one of the Gallery's most important aims — to place the institution in the public experience of the city."

That formulation — placing the institution in the public experience of the city — deserves to be held as more than architectural rhetoric. It describes a relationship between a gallery and its citizenry that is fundamentally democratic in its premise: the gallery does not stand apart from the city, demanding that people seek it out; it situates itself within the city’s living texture, making encounter possible.

The GOMA has a total floor area over 25,000 square metres, and the largest exhibition gallery is 1,100 square metres. The final construction cost was around 107 million dollars. Construction commenced in 2004 and was completed in time for the building’s inaugural exhibition.

THE OPENING AND ITS INAUGURAL STATEMENT.

GOMA opened not with a retrospective of safe canonical works but with the fifth chapter of the Asia Pacific Triennial — a declaration that this building was conceived from the outset as a home for the living, the unsettled, and the geographically committed. Construction of the new Gallery of Modern Art began in 2004 and was completed in 2006 for the launch of the Fifth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, when Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho’s enormous mural greeted the visitor as they entered GOMA for the first time. Displayed across both Gallery sites, the exhibition was instantly twice the size of its previous incarnations.

The doubling of physical space was also a doubling of conceptual range. The Triennial could now breathe across two full campuses, each with distinct spatial characters — the horizontal, light-diffused QAG and the vertically dynamic, river-facing GOMA. Suddenly, the most ambitious international survey of Asia-Pacific contemporary art had the infrastructure its vision had always required.

GOMA also houses the Australian Cinémathèque, the only facility of its kind in an Australian art museum. This was not an afterthought. The inclusion of a dedicated film and moving-image facility within an art gallery spoke to a curatorial understanding — still novel in Australian institutional culture at the time — that cinema is not separate from contemporary art but continuous with it. Since opening at GOMA in 2006, the Australian Cinémathèque has become recognised for its ambitious, research-driven programming and commitment to showcasing global screen culture. The Cinémathèque’s two purpose-built cinemas, Cinema A with 220 seats and Cinema B with 110 seats, are among Australia’s few venues designed to accommodate the full range of screening formats, including 35mm and 16mm celluloid alongside contemporary digital media.

QAGOMA is the only Australian art gallery with purpose-built facilities dedicated to film and the moving image. That singularity — maintained across nearly two decades — speaks to the consistency of the institutional vision. The Cinémathèque is not a peripheral amenity but a structural feature of how GOMA understands contemporary art in its broadest sense: as encompassing the moving image, experimental cinema, archival film, and the intersection of screen culture with visual art practice.

THE PROGRAM AND THE PROPOSITION OF SCALE.

Over its nearly two decades of operation, GOMA has developed two distinct but related programming identities: the deep, long-term engagement with Asia-Pacific contemporary art through the Triennial and related collection building; and the intermittent but enormously visible program of large-scale international exhibitions that bring global audiences into contact with the gallery’s spaces.

The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art is QAGOMA’s flagship exhibition series. Since 1993, the Triennial has drawn more than four million visitors with an ever-evolving mix of exciting and important contemporary art by more than one thousand artists from the region. The Triennial takes over both QAG and GOMA every three years with an exhibition, film programs, learning initiatives, Children’s Art Centre projects and a dedicated public program of talks and workshops. The series has seen the Gallery develop long-standing partnerships throughout the region and helped build one of the world’s most significant collections of contemporary Asian and Pacific art.

The APT remains the only major exhibition series in the world to focus exclusively on the contemporary art of Asia, the Pacific, and Australia. That distinctiveness is not accidental — it is the product of an institutional commitment made in 1993 and deepened over more than thirty years of practice. The Triennial is covered in detail elsewhere in this series. What matters here is to observe that GOMA’s existence transformed what the Triennial could be: it gave the exhibition room to commission at scale, to handle major installations that could not previously be accommodated, to spread across two campus buildings with complementary spatial characteristics.

Beyond the Triennial, GOMA’s international exhibition program has consistently drawn audiences whose scale surprised even those who had advocated for the building’s construction. The 2010 exhibition of hyperrealistic sculptures by British artist Ron Mueck featured life-sized and oversized human figures and drew 187,341 visitors over three months, underscoring public fascination with figurative art. The 2017 show Marvel: Creating the Cinematic Universe set a record for ticketed exhibitions at GOMA with 269,000 attendees, demonstrating the gallery’s ability to bridge popular culture and fine art.

These figures are not simply attendance statistics. They represent the degree to which GOMA succeeded in expanding the gallery-going public — attracting audiences who would not historically have considered a contemporary art institution as a destination. The question of whether such exhibitions dilute or deepen a gallery’s purpose is a live one in institutional culture worldwide. What GOMA demonstrates, across a long body of evidence, is that popular engagement and serious curatorial ambition can be housed in the same institution without either destroying the other.

By 2014, over 10 million people had visited both sites since the establishment of GOMA. That milestone — a decade of combined attendance crossing eight figures — was achieved without significant compromise to the program’s integrity. The Triennial continued. The Cinémathèque continued its research-driven programming. The Children’s Art Centre, embedded in GOMA from the outset, continued its work of connecting young audiences to contemporary visual practice. Across both galleries, QAGOMA presents ever-changing exhibitions of contemporary and historical Australian and international art, accompanied by dynamic programs and events, and holds a globally significant collection of contemporary art from Australia, Asia and the Pacific.

WHAT THE COLLECTION ARGUES ABOUT IDENTITY.

A gallery’s collection is its most durable argument — more durable than any individual exhibition, more durable than any single season’s programming decisions. What QAGOMA has chosen to collect, particularly in the years since GOMA’s opening, represents a particular claim about where Australia sits in its own region and how it understands its cultural inheritance.

QAGOMA holds a collection of more than 20,000 artworks from Australia and around the world, with an internationally significant collection of contemporary Asian and Pacific art. It has extensive collections of Asian, Oceanian, Australian and Indigenous Australian art. QAGOMA’s contemporary Asian art collection is among the most extensive of its kind in the world, with over one thousand works dating from the late 1960s to the present, documenting modern historical trends of social change and changing patterns of artistic production. The collection demonstrates the contributions of Asian artists to global contemporary art, and the influence of traditions, philosophies and techniques. The collection includes leading artists from all parts of Asia, as well as the Asian diaspora, with strengths in contemporary Chinese art, contemporary Japanese art, contemporary Indian art and a major collection of Southeast Asian art.

This collecting orientation — grounded in the Asia-Pacific region rather than in the European and North American canon that has historically dominated Australian gallery acquisitions — is an institutional argument about Australian identity. It says that Queensland, and by extension Australia, belongs to a region rather than to a nostalgic imaginary cultural homeland in the northern hemisphere. It says that the art being made in Indonesia, India, South Korea, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, the Philippines, and a dozen other neighbouring cultures is not exotic but proximate — part of the same living world.

The expertise developed since APT1 in 1993 in staging the Triennial has led to the establishment of the Australian Centre of Asia Pacific Art, to foster alliances, scholarship and publishing, and the formation of an internationally significant collection of art from the Asia Pacific region. The collection did not precede the program — it grew with it, shaped by curatorial travel, by the relationships formed with artists, by the process of commissioning works that would not otherwise exist. This is a different model of institution-building from the model of acquisition-by-purchase from established markets, and it has produced a collection whose distinctiveness is genuine rather than claimed.

GOMA, SOUTH BANK, AND THE CITY'S CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY.

The Gallery of Modern Art sits within a precinct — the Queensland Cultural Centre at South Bank — that has been transforming Brisbane’s sense of itself for more than four decades. The 1982 opening of QAG was part of the first stage of that transformation. The announcement of the Queensland Art Gallery’s new premises to be built at South Brisbane in 1969, ultimately morphing into the Queensland Cultural Centre, would signal the transformation of the area. The project would be the catalyst for other major developments at South Bank.

GOMA extended that transformation in a second wave. The two architecturally-acclaimed galleries, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, sit 150 metres apart in the Queensland Cultural Centre, both situated on the banks of the Maiwar River in South Brisbane. The geography here is not incidental. The riverine setting — facing the CBD across the water, adjacent to the South Bank Parklands, connected to the State Library and other cultural institutions — gives QAGOMA a civic centrality that few galleries outside Sydney or Melbourne have historically claimed. GOMA’s placement reinforced that centrality, adding a second cultural anchor to the south bank and drawing the axis of Brisbane’s public cultural life firmly into the precinct.

James Turrell’s architectural light installation Night Life is activated at GOMA, illuminating the building from within from sunset to midnight daily. This kind of permanent, publicly visible gesture — art as civic infrastructure, the gallery made luminous for the city — represents a relationship between institution and urban space that goes beyond exhibition programming. It declares that the gallery is always present, always active, always part of the city’s nightly visual experience.

As Brisbane prepares for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Queensland Cultural Centre and its institutions occupy a central position in the state’s cultural ambitions. The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games is described by Arts Queensland as a once-in-a-generation event and a global platform for Queensland’s creativity and vibrancy. The Games and associated cultural programming will be transformational for Queensland, activating communities with new and enhanced infrastructure and events. Arts, culture and creativity will underpin the Games experience, with rich and engaging statewide arts experiences set to elevate and enhance Brisbane 2032 legacy outcomes. The Queensland Government has identified a programming strategy with the cultural and collecting institutions at the Queensland Cultural Centre that showcases the State’s collections and expands major programming to support the runway to 2032. In this context, GOMA’s nineteen years of practice in hosting ambitious, large-scale international exhibitions becomes a rehearsal infrastructure — an institutional capability already in place for the moment when the world arrives.

WHAT CHANGED, AND WHAT REMAINS TO BE SAID.

To ask what GOMA changed about contemporary art in Australia is to ask a question with both institutional and cultural dimensions. Institutionally, GOMA demonstrated that a state outside Sydney or Melbourne could operate a major international-calibre gallery — one capable of hosting exhibitions of genuine global significance, building a collection whose distinctiveness was recognised by peer institutions worldwide, and sustaining an audience large enough to justify continued public investment. Artists represented in QAGOMA’s collection include Xu Bing, Atul Dodiya, Nam June Paik, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Ufan and Ai Weiwei — names that appear in the collections of the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and MoMA.

Culturally, GOMA changed what could be expected of a public gallery. Its commitment to accessibility — entry to the gallery is free, including most exhibitions, screenings, and programs, though some special events require paid tickets — is not simply a pricing policy. It is a civic statement about who the gallery is for. The combination of free entry with ambitious exhibition programming, a dedicated children’s facility, a cinema, and a publicly accessible riverside campus represents a particular model of cultural democracy: the gallery as civic commons rather than as consecrated cultural temple.

The institution’s recent international partnerships reflect a growing recognition of its standing. In a landmark collaboration between QAGOMA and the Victoria and Albert Museum, highlights from the QAGOMA Collection are being showcased for global audiences in London in an exhibition titled Rising Voices. That a Queensland public gallery’s collection is now considered exhibition-worthy in one of the world’s great museums is not a small thing. It is the culmination of a particular institutional argument, made over more than three decades, about what it means to collect from the Asia-Pacific with seriousness and consistency.

None of this was inevitable. It required sustained political will — the willingness of successive Queensland governments to fund a building, maintain free admission, and support acquisition programs focused on a region that the international art market had long undervalued. It required curatorial conviction — the decision, made in 1993 and maintained ever since, that the art of Australia’s neighbourhood deserved the same serious institutional attention as the art of New York or London. And it required a building: a physical space whose architecture itself embodied a civic proposition, whose very placement in the city declared that contemporary art was not a luxury for elites but a common good.

The permanent civic address of this institution in Queensland’s onchain identity layer — qagoma.queensland — reflects something of that durability. Just as GOMA’s construction was an act of civic inscription, anchoring a cultural ambition in permanent stone and glass along the Maiwar River, so too does a stable digital identity anchor an institution’s name, its history, and its significance into the permanent record of place. Queensland’s cultural infrastructure — its collections, its buildings, its relationships with artists across the Asia-Pacific region — deserves to be legible not only to those who walk its riverbank galleries today, but to anyone, anywhere, at any point in the future, who wants to understand what this part of the world chose to value, and chose to preserve. GOMA is one of the clearest answers Queensland has ever given to that question.