Founded by Jim and Jane Henson in 1955, The Jim Henson Company has created some of the most cherished characters in screen history and continues to revolutionise the art of puppetry for television and film. Their indelible imprint on entertainment, education and popular culture globally is seen in the much-loved series Fraggle Rock and Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, the treasured fantasy worlds of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, the iconic characters of the Muppets, and the instantly recognisable residents of Sesame Street.

Immense and immersive, the exhibition will explore the Company’s dynamic trajectory from practical puppetry to today’s animatronic and digital innovations, as well as its ongoing dedication to the craft of creature design and trailblazing developments in on-screen puppeteering. It will feature hundreds of objects, from practical puppets and animatronic creatures to props, costumes, original drawings and moving image clips.

In a world-first, ‘Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company’ will include the Great Hall set from the Emmy Award-winning television series Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, taking audiences behind the scenes of a working puppeteer’s film set.

Make, Believe, Magic – The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company
12 September 2026 – 18 April 2027
Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson invites us on an expansive multi-sensory journey to the edges of perception. Choose your path through a rocky, primordial landscape, navigate an optical puzzle, or envision the future form of our city.

This Brisbane-exclusive exhibition draws from the three-decade career of one of the world’s most influential living artists. Spanning the Gallery of Modern Art’s (GOMA) ground floor galleries, the exhibition will include important early works and expansive site-specific installations, many never before seen in Australia.

From the magical early work Beauty 1993, which suspends a rainbow in a veil of mist, to Pluriverse assembly 2021, a spatial installation that unfurls ever-changing reflections of light, Eliasson’s creations come to life as they meet the viewer’s senses and body.

Two much-loved QAGOMA works feature: the rocky landscape and running water of the immense and immersive Riverbed 2014; and The cubic structural evolution project 2004, a huge all-white LEGO city perpetually built and rebuilt by visitors throughout the exhibition.

Eliasson’s artistic practice is grounded in the distinctive forms of his familial home Iceland, which will be reflected in a selection of photographs of the landscape, light and human experience of the country.

Olafur Eliasson Presence Exhibition
6 December 2025 – 12 July 2026
GOMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Maggie Cheung is one of Hong Kong cinema’s most iconic stars. Celebrated internationally for her expressive naturalism, physical grace and inimitable screen presence, Cheung crafted a genre-hopping body of work that shifts between broad romantic comedies, goopy horror flicks, martial arts extravaganzas and poignant arthouse dramas.

Cheung, who spent much of her early life in the United Kingdom, found fame as the runner up of the Miss Hong Kong pageant in 1983. She quickly found success in comedies and genre films, with a breakthrough role in Jackie Chan’s action classic Police Story 1985. Her appearance in Wong Kar-wai’s debut feature As Tears Go By 1988 launched a renowned series of collaborations with the director that culminated with In the Mood for Love 2000, a masterpiece of longing that is frequently cited as one of the greatest films of the century.

Throughout her career, Cheung also worked with some of the most acclaimed filmmakers of her era. Her performances in films directed by Ann Hui, Stanley Kwan and Olivier Assayas reflect her own layered cultural identities, exploring fame and postcolonial themes of race and migration. She also took on more physical roles in wuxia and martial arts films, such as the fantastical Green Snake 1993 and the visually resplendent Hero 2002.

After decades in the film industry, her final feature remains Clean 2004, for which she received the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. Since then, she has largely retired from the screen, pursuing music and other personal interests, while remaining an icon of an indelible era of Hong Kong cinema.

This program brings together more than 20 films starring Cheung, with many titles screening from new digital restorations and imported 35mm prints. It showcases the legendary breadth and depth of Cheung’s career, in one of the largest retrospectives of the actor to be staged anywhere in the world.

In the Mood for Maggie Cheung
24 October – 30 November 2025
Gallery of Modern Art, Cinema A, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

One of American cinema’s boldest voices, Charles Burnett (b. 1944) has crafted a body of work defined by its empathy, literary interiority and clarity of vision. Best known for his debut feature Killer of Sheep 1977, Burnett is renowned for blending immersive naturalism and poetic lyricism in his textured expressions of the Black experience in America.

Born in Mississippi, Burnett moved to the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles as a child. During his college years, he became a leading figure of the ‘L.A. Rebellion,’ a group of filmmakers that first emerged from UCLA in the late 1960s. This loose collective worked together to create an alternative to Hollywood fantasy, with filmmaking that drew on cinéma vérité and Italian neorealism to capture the rhythms and details of contemporary Black life.

Burnett’s career has repeatedly been marked by setbacks, with three of his five features only officially released decades after their completion due to rights disputes and bureaucratic wrangling. He has nevertheless remained an uncompromising and celebrated cinematic artist, receiving a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ in 1988 and an honorary Academy Award in 2007. His Killer of Sheep is now recognised as a major and widely influential entry in the American film canon, and was voted one of the 50 greatest films ever made in the BFI’s 2022 Sight & Sound poll.

The program brings together Burnett’s feature films — his unofficial ‘Los Angeles cycle,’ as described by the New Yorker — along with a selection of rarely screened short films and his powerful docufiction The Final Insult 1997. It includes the new 4K restorations of Killer of Sheep and The Annihilation of Fish 1999, carefully remastered in consultation with Burnett and presented in Australia for the first time as part of this program.

Charles Burnett L.A. Rebel Retrospective
10 – 22 October 2025
Gallery of Modern Art, Cinema A, GOMA
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Anarchic, absurdist and anti-authoritarian, the films of the Marx Brothers — wisecracking Groucho, crafty Chico, silent clown Harpo and straight-man Zeppo — remain eternally revolutionary and side-splittingly hilarious.

This program brings together their first six films, presenting their five screen appearances together (including such classics as Horse Feathers 1932 and Duck Soup 1933) and their first film as a Zeppo-less trio, the comic masterpiece A Night at the Opera 1935. These works showcase their comedy of chaos at its zenith, with the films combining the electricity of their stage performances with the freedom afforded by the infinite possibilities of cinema.

The Marx Brothers – Monkey Business
13 July – 21 September 2025
Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Over a career that stretched across eight decades, Corman found acclaim for both his work as director — particularly his ‘Poe cycle’, a series of eight sumptuously realised films each adapting different tales by Edgar Allan Poe — and as a producer who mentored some of Hollywood’s brightest talents in their formative years.

This program brings together the complete ‘Poe cycle’, alongside a selection of his other significant directorial efforts and some of the key Corman-produced early works by such major filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich that paved the way for the iconic New Hollywood movement.

Roger Corman: B-Movie Maestro
16 May – 22 Jun 2025
Gallery of Modern Art, Cinema B, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Emerging from years of Soviet Union rule, which heavily restricted what stories could be told, a new wave of filmmakers born after the declaration of independence in 1991 are leading the rise of films that unflinchingly have much to say about injustice, culture and tradition.

Asia Pacific Triennial Cinema Children of Independence: The Rise of Central Asian Cinema
Gallery of Modern Art & Cinema A, Brisbane
12 February – 19 March 2025
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Throughout cinematic history, ‘the future’ has served as a rich playground for filmmakers to explore the imagined, the taboo and the unknown. Today, anthropocentric concerns, including the accelerated rate of climate change, increased migration, and the rapid pace of technological development, have catapulted concerns about the future of the environment, culture and identity into the present, raising questions about the legacies of humankind.

Presented across four interconnected strands titled ‘Ends of the Earth’, ‘Revolutionary Roads’, ‘Random Access Memories’ and ‘Human Evolutions’, the selected films boldly ask the question ‘what if?’ to consider what the movement of humanity — both in terms of geography and evolution — means for our environmental future, our personal and cultural identities, and our memories across the region.

Asia Pacific Triennial Cinema – Future Visions
10 January – 16 March 2025
Gallery of Modern Art & Cinema A, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Her stories draw from Indonesian art traditions including costume, dance and theatre regularly focussing on women navigating cultural restrictions and expectations. Her films masterfully explore the narrative through nuanced relationships between parents and children, husband and wife, siblings and young love.

Andini has found acclaim at many of the world’s leading international film festivals – including Berlin, Toronto, Tokyo and Busan.

This program represents the first focus on her body of work and a rare international spotlight on a mid-career woman filmmaker from the Southeast Asia region.

Asia Pacific Triennial Cinema – Kamila Andini
11 January – 8 February 2025
Gallery of Modern Art & Cinema A, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Seventy artists, collectives and projects from more than 30 countries will feature in the eleventh chapter of the flagship Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) exhibition series, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art.

Bringing compelling new art to Brisbane, the Triennial is a gateway to the rapidly evolving artistic expression of Australia, Asia and the Pacific. Alongside artists and makers whose work has not been previously seen in Australia are a raft of new co-curated projects investigating artforms and cultural contexts rarely encountered outside their home localities.

For the first time this Triennial includes creators from Saudi Arabia, Timor-Leste and Uzbekistan, while First Nations, minority and diaspora cultures hold a central place, as do the collective, performative and community-driven modes of artmaking that thrive in the region. Through nuanced approaches to storytelling, materials and technique the exhibition explores themes that resonate across these cultural landscapes, such as how we care for the natural and urban environments, protect and revive cultural heritage, and how histories of migration and labour shape experience today.

As always, the Triennial is conceived and shaped from the ground up by expert hands. Artists, curators, interlocutors, cultural allies and partners have meaningfully woven the region’s creative stories into an exhibition that will inspire, uplift and move you.

The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
30 November 2024 – 27 April 2025
Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au