Key Themes and Contexts: I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies

The subject of borders and migration is a recurrent theme throughout this exhibition. While Arpita Akhanda weaves together colonial maps with images from her family archive to consider the impact of the partition of India on her family, Sheida Soleimani’s layered tableaux draw on the migratory movements of birds to reflect on her family’s personal experiences of exile persecution and migration from Iran.

In Reena Saini Kallat’s work, Pattern Recognition, the artist takes a meticulous approach to the subject of social and political borders, documenting and indexing the different rights and privileges relating to international movement afforded to 28 different nations. Through her work, we are encourage to understand borders not so much as physical fences or barricades but as constraints placed on individuals as a result of policy and privilege.

Collage opens up new possibilities and enables us to bring new ideas into conversation with one another. In the exhibition, artists including Sim Chi Yin, Jess Atieno, Brook Andrew and Wendimagegn Belete use collage to challenge the idea of history as fixed, creating counter narratives that critique power structures and imagine alternative pasts, presents and futures.

As an artist of Wiradjuri, Ngunawal and Celtic heritage, Brook Andrew uses his artistic practice to highlight how Western narratives have stereotyped and marginalised Indigenous Australian voices. In his work SMASH IT, Andrew layers image and sound to challenge how colonial histories are remembered.

Meanwhile, in Chi Yin’s work, the artist inserts members of her own family into archival lantern slides depicting scenes from colonial era British Malaya (now Malaysia) and southeast Asia. Here, the archive provides a fantastical and unstable site for photographic time travel, enabling the artist to muse on issues of trauma and the long legacies of colonial violence as well as the possibilities for transgenerational memory to shape the future.