Pride Gallery

It’s a rare thing to have a space dedicated to LGBTIQ+ culture and it is with immense excitement that we launch the visual arts program in the Pride Gallery. The Victorian Pride Centre provides opportunities for visual arts and archival exhibitions and displays that focus on art by LGBTIQ+ artists and/or art that focuses on LGBTIQ+ issues. See our current and upcoming exhibitions and an archive of past works below.

Current Exhibition

Our

David Arlo is a sculptor and video artist combining domestic crafts with a range of imagery that spans across the familial, the queer and the grotesque. His installations and films seek to entice viewers with a sense of comfort and nostalgia, an atmosphere that is simultaneously disrupted from within by emergent disturbing or jarring visceral cues.

November 2024 - 12 January 2025

Current Exhibition

You Looking At Me, Looking At You

Memories of intimate shared experiences taken in moments of life, love and loss. These unrefined portraits by artist and educator Emma Armstrong Porter are technically inconsistent because they were shot at a decisive moment, guided by emotion, not photographic convention.

November 2024 - January 2025

Upcoming Exhibition

Gender Fluids – VPC ‘SUMMA 2025

A celebration of the natural world’s ingenuity and resilience, spotlighting the gender fluidity of marine creatures like the starfish, sea slug, and oyster. Through a dazzling mix of framed photographs, textile banners, costumes, and video, the exhibition captures the luminescent glory of these organisms in playful, sparkling tableaus.

15 January - 10 March, 2025.

Upcoming Exhibition

Top

This body of work depicts the experience of three friends as they navigate individual experiences with top surgery. The work explores the complexity of medically transitioning, and invites reflection on the complexities of body, self-expression and community. 

12 March - 28 April, 2025

Upcoming Exhibition

Don’t Be Too Polite: Feminist Posters and their Collectives

This exhibition highlights the vital contributions of Australian lesbian-feminist artists and print collectives over the past five decades, showcasing their roles in LGBTIQA+ activism and artistic expression.

12 March - 28 April, 2025

Upcoming Exhibition

Scars and Stars

Join us at the Pride Gallery for Ace Astrophel Hengel's Scars and Stars, a one-of-a-kind work that celebrates the beauty of identity, self-expression, and visibility within the Trans community.

12 March - 28 April, 2025

Upcoming Exhibition

Kin: A Celebration of Queer Resilience and Connection

A poignant celebration of queer connection, chosen families, and the spaces that offer protection, joy, and belonging. Through a series of documentary-style photographs, J captures the quiet and vibrant acts of intimacy that sustain queer lives, crafting an archive of resilience that speaks to both the deeply personal and the profoundly communal.

1 May - 16 June, 2025

Upcoming Exhibition

more than these bones

A powerful exploration of identity and self-discovery, blending poetry and photography to illuminate the complexities of a queer Aboriginal existence. With a voice that is both timeless and urgently contemporary, this work offers a vital, polyphonic perspective that speaks to the richness of experience, love, and resilience.

18 June - 4 August, 2025.

Upcoming Exhibition

Sport with Pride and Joy

A pictorial representation of the people behind the many Pride rounds, games and tournaments and LGBTIQA+ sporting clubs featured on Game On! across two seasons. ‘Game On!’ is a sport show on JOY 94.9fm. Each week the show focuses on showcasing where sport is welcoming, inclusive, safe and fun for the Rainbow community. There is no shortage of exciting stories of where the sporting landscape is evolving to be a place where the LGBTIQA+ community can shine.

6 August – 22 September, 2025

Upcoming Exhibition

Queer Youth Now: A collection of stories from LGBTQIA+ youth

A storytelling exhibition that amplifies the voices of LGBTQIA+ youth, members of the Minus18 Young Leader program. The program equips queer young people with leadership skills, confidence, and social connection, empowering them to be the next generation of LGBTQIA+ leaders.

6 August - 22 September, 2025.

Upcoming Exhibition

All the Rage

A photographic exhibition celebrating upcycled fashion and diversity. The work is a collaboration with the award winning Rawcus Ensemble, the Fast Fashun Collective and Pia Johnson who together will create a photographic exhibition of fierce, sexy and powerful works.

24 September 2025 – 10 November, 2025

Upcoming Exhibition

Queering

A curated selection of ongoing self-portraits that were diarised from 2022.

24 September – 10 November, 2025

Upcoming Exhibition

Another Quiet Protest

This powerful exhibition features ceramic figures representing micro-minorities within the queer community, responding to the global trend of diminishing trans rights. Through the use of progressive rainbow colours, these figures symbolise the strength of diverse identities standing united for recognition and equality.

12 November 2025 – 8 January, 2026

Upcoming Exhibition

Rainbow Universes

Inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and trans biologist Joan Roughgarden’s exploration of biological diversity in Evolution's Rainbow, these Riso prints conjures parallel, rainbow-tinged universes in which human gender and sex are diversely configured. Imagined as a series of fabulated anthropological reports from these worlds, the work explores joyous, queerer and more-than-human modes of living.

12 November 2025 – 8 January 2026.

Past Exhibition

TransTrans: Transnational Trans* Histories

Curated by Birgit Lang and Katie Sutton, TransTrans explores transnational networks of trans people who shaped early gender-diverse histories between the 1900s and the 1960s.

September - November 2024

Past Exhibition

Persona

This exhibition by Artist Camila Pazz showcases humanity’s richness, urging a more compassionate world where diversity and tolerance prevail—a poignant reminder that, above all, we share the vital title of being human.

July - September 2024

Past Exhibition

Muru-ba

Muru-ba is a physical and online exhibition showcasing the faces and stories of First Nations LGBTQIA+ Elders involved with the LGBTQIA+ rights and First Nations community movements since the 1970s from across Australia.

July 2024

Past Exhibition

The Air is Electric

During his travels in the United States, David McDiarmid was constantly documenting his experiences in correspondence and photographs, and through these we can start to understand the excitement of the liberatory activism and emergent gay community of the late 1970s - ‘the air was electric’ with new possibilities and freedom.

May - June 2024

Past Exhibition

SEEN/SCENE

SEEN/SCENE exposes the often unseen artistry of TGD Cinematographers, Intimacy Coordinators, Grips, Producers, caterers, all working with actors and directors behind the scenes. These images
create space for greater representation.

May - June 2024

Past Exhibition

male//chair

We're excited to announce our next major exhibition – 'male//chair’ – by Melbourne artist garrie maguire. This photographic exhibition will show in the Pride Gallery as part of VPC's visual arts program from March 6 to April 28, 2024.

This photographic exhibition employs a simple set up, where each individual sits stripped of conventional gender or status signifiers, with a red kitchen chair. The camera serves as the audience, capturing the essence of each participant's raw presentation. No names, no identities—just pure expression.

March - April 2024

Past Exhibition

Queer Latinx: Migrating Down Under

As part of our 2024 Midsumma Festival program, this photographic project explores the layers of identity and intersectionality experienced by LGBTIQ+ Latinx people living in Australia. Photographer Arun Ernesto Munoz skilfully captures these narratives, offering a unique perspective that allows the subjects to present themselves authentically, sharing their lives and new realities as migrants.

January - March 2024

Past Exhibition

Beguiling

‘Beguiling’ – by acclaimed artist Professor Dr. Lisa Anderson. The exhibition is an evocative, multimedia exploration of changing landscapes and environmental collapse.

November 2023 - January 2024

Past Exhibition

Rainbow Bridges

The Rainbow Bridges art project brings together the voices of young lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex people and older members of the LGBTIQA+ community of the Macedon Ranges.

September - November 2023

Past Exhibition

If the World Was Just

As part of resident organisation Thorne Harbour Health‘s 40th anniversary, ‘If the World Was Just’ is a photographic exhibition exploring LGBTIQ+ human rights around the world through a series of portraits of local LGBTIQ+ community members.

July - September 2023

Past Exhibition

#AllAboard Dress and Exhibition

To celebrate the #AllAboard Pride Tram design competition the Pride Centre is displaying entries from last year’s #AllAboard design competition this winter, along with the iconic ‘tram fabric’ dress designed by Gaetano Contarino for local drag artist Frock Hudson.

June - August 2023

Past Exhibition

The Queer Gaze

The exhibition features a stunning collection of images from the iconic lesbian magazine Wicked Women, which was launched in 1988 and played a pivotal role in disrupting the rigid political climate that dominated the lesbian scene at that time.

April - June 2023