Dis/place: Making Work in Exile
Artists crossing borders
Dis/Place: Making Work in Exile is an exhibition featuring eight artists from across the globe who live and work in Australia. Artists splash colour, scatter words and contest international boundaries as they explore and express the experience of creating work in exile.
Dis/place Exhibition
11 May – 1 July
Campbelltown Arts Centre
Art Gallery Rd
Campbelltown
Exhibition launch:
7pm Friday, 11 May
Dis/place
Displace is the result of a three year partnership between Information and Cultural Exchange, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Campbelltown Arts Centre. The project has supported participating artists to develop new work around the theme of displacement.
ICE Director, Lena Nahlous says: “Dis/place confronts some of the burning questions of our contemporary situation – paranoia about the ‘other’, the fear of ‘terror’ expressed in formal policies of detention and punishment, the embodied experiences of torture, pain, war and displacement, and the longing for (or the confusion about) home’.”
The work of Kurdish artist Sardar Sinjawi embodies his own experience of fleeing northern Iraq into Turkey following the first Gulf war and George Bush senior’s call to the Kurds to ‘rise up’ against Saddam Hussein. Sinjawi’s installation of an abandoned city and an ink work of fragile, small human figures crossing an imposing mountain considers the imprint of memory on being exiled.
Min Kyaw is a from the Mon minority in Burma who describes himself as ‘a poet, a painter, a designer and a political activist’. His poem ‘A Boat Wreck on the Shore of Paradise’ chronicles his own experience of seeking asylum in Australia, and is among several bilingual poems scribed on the exhibition walls.
Fozia Zahid and Zahid Ahmed present a video installation and print work produced in Pakistan to where the artists have returned following their attempt to migrate to Australia. Working with their Australian mentor and artist, Deborah Kelly, they have developed a work of private intimate video conversations and digital posters combining Urdu and English text to challenge the stereotypes of Pakistanis they encountered here and to say ‘being together is not scary’
Campbelltown Art Centre Director, Ms Lisa Havilah, says the Centre “works very hard to present a program that is socially engaged with ideas and issues that are priorities for our communities.”
Western Sydney is home to Australia’s largest communities of recently-arrived migrants and refugees. It has also been an area where ground-breaking cultural and artistic collaborations with communities have taken place, and where new definitions of ‘the arts’ in Australia are being created.
Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor said that “the project is a great model as to how galleries and museums can work closely with individuals in marginalised communities to affect cultural and perceptional change within the contemporary art context. Dis/place: Making Work in Exile investigates how exhibiting institutions like ours can provide a platform for art practice in response to the refugee and migration experience in Australia post 9/11.’
For further information, contact Nadyat El- Gawley
Subscribe