'If the Seeds Chose Where to Grow' by Rithika Merchant - Howard Smith Wharves art projection

From 30 November 2024 to 5 May 2025, we invite you to explore Council’s latest Outdoor Gallery exhibition, Asia Pacific Triennial Kids: Outdoors presented in collaboration with Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)’s Children’s Art Centre.

Asia Pacific Triennial Kids: Outdoors features eye-catching displays made especially for children and families by artists included in QAGOMA’s 11th Asia Pacific Triennial exhibition (Asia Pacific Triennial Kids).

Rithika Merchant (India b.1986) creates bold paintings and collages using a combination of watercolour and cut paper elements, drawing on 17th-century botanical prints and folk art.

Merchant is interested in the idea of ‘terraformation’, or ‘earth-shaping’–the process of making a planet, moon or other celestial body fit for human life. This artwork displayed in the Outdoor Gallery features imagery from Merchant’s Asia Pacific Triennial Kids project, If the Seeds Chose Where to Grow (2024), which imagines a new world inhabited by unusual hybrid ‘beings’ and plant forms.

Learn more about the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial exhibition, including Asia Pacific Triennial Kids.

Brisbane City Council's Outdoor Gallery transforms Brisbane's laneways, city streets and car parks into imaginative, curious, and engaging spaces. Comprising of light boxes, banners, vitrines, and evening projections, the Outdoor Gallery displays art outside in city streets, instead of inside on gallery walls. 2023 marked 10 years of the Outdoor Gallery program.

Share your experience of the Outdoor Gallery exhibitions and public programs on social media using #BNEPublicArt.

Image credit: If the Seeds Chose Where to Grow (2024) by Rithika Merchant, projected onto the Howard Smith Wharves Cliffs.