Atong Atem continues her exploration of identity and culture through the creation of surreal and fantastical environments. Faces are physically obscured through vibrant use of colour that showcases individuality and allows her subjects to exist in a futuristic yet idealistic space. Atem invites viewers to contemplate how their identity exists in the world and the ways in which we construct images and stories to understand ourselves and our surroundings.

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Courtesy of MARS Gallery

Lilah Benetti is an award winning emerging Artist and Filmmaker based in Naarm/Melb (AUS) working across selected experimental and narrative genres of film to explore stories of otherness, intersectionality and nuances that shape cross-cultural Australian identities. More Like a River is a short film that speaks to the changes experienced post 2020; when the Black Lives Matter movement exploded globally and Melbourne experienced the world's strictest lockdown. It speaks to transcending emotions associated with change and the growing pains that often seem overwhelming to work through as we look to find solace in self and as a community; we adapt, persevere and overcome in the face of adversity, in order to become more like a river than a rock. More Like a River was created and directed by Lilah Benetti with cinematography by the incredibly talented Sam Biddle and stars the multifaceted artist and musician Pookie.

Portraits of eight diverse creative people merge together to form a Hindu deity. This illustration-based work celebrates difference, and unity through shared oppression.

This artwork is about itself but not as an isolated phenomenon akin to existing in a vacuum. This self-referential state is predominantly framed by the work’s fast-moving animated text, also operating in what could be considered as the artwork’s primary narrative. This animated text responds to the artwork’s active and time-based relationship to the public, at the moment of encounter. Ideas of authoring an artwork with the intention of affecting its audience (whether that is via materiality, mode of encounter, visibility of its author, context of its presentation and/or other influencing factors) drove the broader narrative of Event/Affect and that of the expanded, first iteration of 2018. Exhibited at Seventh’s gallery (then) Gertrude street location, this first iteration included the attempted rediversion of the artist fee, as economic capital, to a Gertrude St related ‘Not For Profit’ organisation, Whitelion. This gesture, as a formal part of the work, responded to the idea of affecting a public in a socio-cultural, qualitative manner via the artwork. The distribution of the artist fee was a gesture that was purposely in contrast to the idea of a qualitative social-cultural change within the individual thought to potentially exist (as part of the intentionally affective artwork) at the moment of encounter. Event/Affect formalised its intended affect in the diversion of its artist fee. As a side note, this capital did not come to affect the economic capital of Whitelion via encountering, what could be considered, the bureaucratic boundary of the unanswered email. Given the benefit of time, and apart from the potential qualitative affects of both iterations, the economic capital exchanged for the Cultural capital and labour of both iterations has come to be purely a quantitative exchange, for now.

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Courtesy of MARS Gallery

Poetry links Hazara, considered the most persecuted ethnic minority in Afghanistan, to their culture, their history, to country, to each other. In former times revered verses, or quatrains, were shared from one generation to the next. Hazara's of today are more than likely to text their poems to each other, as did Aziz Fayaz, when he wrote the poem featured in Bamiyarra Not So Still(s), a response to the many Hazara who had lost their lives, desperate to seek asylum from persecution, on boats that had sunk in the world's oceans. Bamiyarra Not So Still(s) was presented by Home Lands v2, a collaboration between La Trobe University, Swinburne University, City of Melbourne Arts and Participation Program and the Cultural Development Network. Home Lands is funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, City of Melbourne and the Cultural Development Network.