Join us from 4pm Sunday 11 October at Bookrunner to celebrate a new body of work by Tom Campbell for the 2026 Canberra Art Biennial, titled there is no mountain.

About the Exhibition

Tom’s 2026 Biennial work considers architectures of language and translation, in particular how language functions as a technology. Presented at Bookrunner, a context where texts arrive and depart, writers are pressed up against each other and multiple concurrent times exist together, Tom’s work seeks to open up spaces for experiencing multiple conflicting temporalities simultaneously, and gestures to ideas of how we come to know things, what remains unknowable, and what gets lost or transformed in translation.

The work was developed while Tom was in Taiwan and Sabah, Malaysia, researching histories of language exchange and reconnecting with his mother’s homeland. Tom wishes to thank his grandfather, Datuk Richard Maning and Yu-Ying Chuang for providing translations of his poems suddenly you become strangers and a book about fighting.