Tactical Bodies is a collaborative, research-based project by Meg De Young and Gabrielle Hall-Lomax that explores how gendered expectations shape the ways women use their bodies. Exhibition continues Sunday 18th May — Sunday 15th June 2025.
About the exhibition
Tactical Bodies began with shared reflections on how perceived threat influenced their movement through public spaces—affecting posture and spatial awareness. This insight led them to explore how such conditioned responses might be unlearned through self-defence practices.
Their staged re-enactments resist fixed choreography, embracing contradiction. The resulting images feel simultaneously empowering, absurd, humorous, and unsettling—mirroring the tensions at the heart of self- defence itself. Ultimately, Tactical Bodies reimagines the physical and social limits placed on women’s bodies and proposes ways to resist them through deliberate, embodied action.
Read more on the Program page
Meg De Young & Gabrielle Hall-Lomax, Improvised Weapon, Tactical Bodies, 2025
About the artists
In 2024, Meg De Young and Gabrielle Hall-Lomax began a residency at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Australia, marking the start of their collaborative partnership. Their current research and practice examine how social structures shape women’s experiences, using collaboration and performance to reframe related narratives.
Meg earned First-Class Honours in Photography from the RMIT in 2021. Her ongoing project, The Conversations We Have, won the Ballarat GradFoto 2021 Exhibition and was featured on the cover of Der Greif’s The Collectivity Issue. She also participated in PHOTO 2022’s PHOTO Lab with Magnum Photos. In addition to her photography studies, Meg holds a Diploma of Community Services and a Diploma in Visual Arts, majoring in painting.
Gabrielle Hall-Lomax holds a Master of Arts and Cultural Management from The University of Melbourne and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from RMIT. In 2023, she appeared in Der Greif’s 16th issue, Common Love, curated by Shirin Neshat. The following year, Gabrielle was a finalist in the Palm Photo Prize and presented her solo exhibition, Unbodied, at Blindside Gallery in Melbourne.