Soft Power
Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer, Janet Bi Li Chan, Lou Garcia-Dolnik, Roslyn Orlando, Ryan Andrew Lee, Melody Paloma, and Talia Smith

Curated by Firstdraft
Launching 26 October

Systems of power emerge slowly, manifesting in the periphery and infiltrating spaces so gradually it's sometimes impossible to reckon with a shifting status quo until it is entrenched. Momentum builds imperceptibly, masking fundamental flaws, damage caused and any counter-thinking that could jeopardise the perception that this new system is anything but an inevitability.

In Soft Power, writers and artists explore what is obscured and nullified in emergent and established systems of power. While these systems are broad and largely intangible, their impacts are felt in very measurable ways – from government infrastructure mega-projects, to bitcoin-mined territories, to the ongoing violence of the colonial project in so-called Australia.

Soft Power presents experimental responses, new critiques and speculative futures in the face of myriad power systems we must confront and dismantle.