Rachel O’Reilly (b. Gladstone) is an artist/poet, curator, critic, and educator. She was previously a curator of film, video and new media at Australian Cinematheque, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) and Asia Pacific Triennial, and resident researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands. She teaches the theory seminar 'At the Limits of the Writerly' on planetarity, infrastructure and poetics at the Dutch Art Institute, and is locked down in Meanjin on Turrbal country in ‘Australia’. Her project The Gas Imaginary (2013–2019) has used poetry, moving images, installation and public lectures to explain the colonial legal and technical conceits of unconventional gas investments, in dialogue with Gooreng Gooreng elders and women environmentalists, and has been presented internationally at Tate Liverpool, Van Abbemuseum, E-flux, David Roberts Art Foundation, Qalandiya International and Gasworks. The final work from this series, a feature-length video installation addressing threats of shale gas to 50% of the Northern Territory premieres in Australia at Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane in September 2020. Curatorial projects include Ex-Embassy.com with Sonja Hornung and Planetary Records: Performing Justice between Art and Law with Natasha Ginwala. She publishes on Non-aligned Movement legacies with Jelena Vesic; on the politics of artistic autonomy in settler colonial conditions with Danny Butt; and is undertaking a PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.
