Image: Heide Museum of Modern Art, BULLEEN
Heide Museum of Modern Art has announced 'Badra Aji: Get the boy a dog and call it a day', a guest-curated exhibition by Shell Odgers that will run from 14 March to 16 August 2026 in the Kerry Gardner & Andrew Myer Project Gallery in Bulleen, Australia. The project is described as a semi-narrative installation that brings together drawings on paper and a video-based installation.
According to the museum’s exhibition text, the work follows a search for a missing half-sister and an effort to disprove a hereditary love curse. The exhibition also engages with intergenerational trauma, heteronormativity, and the escalating tide of conservatism and queerphobia in Indonesia. The title work is presented under the name 'Badra Aji: Get the boy a dog and call it a day', and the museum identifies the exhibition as guest curated by Shell Odgers.
The installation merges personal photographs, artefacts and a spoken poetic narrative, extending its subject matter across visual and verbal forms. Heide’s description frames the project as a journey rather than a single fixed story, with the artist using image, object and voice to track family memory and inherited belief. The exhibition material also notes that the work will be accompanied by a catalogue available online.
Heide’s announcement places the exhibition alongside a broader 2026 program that includes presentations such as 'John Perceval: All That We Are', 'Watch These Hands', 'Brassaï: Secret Paris', 'Always Modern: Radical Nurture', and 'Crichton, Tucker, Whiteley: The Chelsea Hotel Years 1967–69'. Within that lineup, 'Badra Aji: Get the boy a dog and call it a day' occupies the museum’s Kerry Gardner & Andrew Myer Project Gallery, a space used for shorter-format projects.
The museum’s website gives the exhibition dates as 14 March to 16 August 2026, with admission included in museum entry. The project is listed as a Heide exhibition in Bulleen, and the museum credits Shell Odgers as guest curator. Heide’s online notice also pairs the exhibition with an installation view image from 2026, underscoring the show’s contemporary presentation at the institution.
