2026 Exhibition Program

Albany Town Hall GallerIES

A DECADE OF PRIDE  

21 Feb - 25 Mar | Albany Town Hall 

A Decade of Pride marks the tenth anniversary of the Albany Pride Festival, one of Australia’s most significant regional Pride celebrations. Curated by James BL Hollands, this retrospective exhibition brings together festival posters, artworks, personal stories and creative contributions that document a decade of visibility, advocacy and community connection in the Great Southern. Together, these works reflect the growth of Albany Pride and honour the people, creativity and resilience that have shaped the festival over its first ten years.

Abettors of the Zeewijk - James BL Hollands

In 1727, two marooned teenagers, Adriaan Spoor and Pieter Engelse, were isolated on separate islands and left off the coast of WA, because of accused crimes of homosexuality. In this exhibition, Hollands displays imagined images of 81 of the faces of the corpses of the men who sailed away, leaving the two to die alone.

Hollands takes stills from his last film, Trill Death Cult -– a film about queer vision, and the invisibility of the queer dead, and inverts it to ask - what happens to the people who watch oppression, what happens to the viewers of atrocities, what happens to those who are complicit within the process of death, what happens to people who kill because of ideology at the moment of their death. Rather than the queer dead being objectified, Hollands reverses the polarities and turns the camera on people who seek political and religious persecution, and we observe their nameless corpse faces.

Hollands creates a visual portmanteau, inverting and redrawing his last film’s stills, and printing them on tracing paper with UV ink and luminous spray paint, placing them on walls, evoking cave painting, Three Six Mafia’s skull T-shirts and the Kryptonian interdimensional super prison of Superman’s Phantom Zone.

Expertly and collaboratively lit by Luke Simpson, Simpson reanimates Hollands’ work within the space, creating a room of the living undead. Hollands and Simpson take these stills and turn them into breathing corpse shadows of a seminal moment in WA history.

Artist Talk: Saturday 21 Feb, 11am 
Albany Town Hall
217 York Street, Albany
Open: Tue-Sat 10-5pm