Mika Benesh: Artist Statement & Bio

Often, protective amulets from Jewish Iraq, Iran and Kurdistan are collected by colonial institutions as relics of lost worlds. Frozen in archives of disuse, they promise an impossible restoration. 

These objects’ stories don’t end after leaving their countries of origin; many are still passed down through families, between friends and lovers in exile. And what of those trapped in the archives? Removed from vibrant inter-faith contexts, they can't keep us safe the way our ancestors made them to. Will we ever be reunited? 

Ella Shohat describes a reunion of displaced Iraqis in the Dar Al Sulh Jewish-Iraqi restaurant project as a warmly embraced homecoming... together mourning our and their exile... And in this coming together, we returned, in an imaginary voyage...

And we are attempting to piece together the fragements and mend broken pieces. A related Arabic word to "sulh," of the same root, is "islah," which refers to mending, fixing, reclaiming, retrieving, piecing together.

Mostly I fantasise about stealing into the collections, breaking the museum glass, reaching in to touch those amulets. Instead I make new ones.

Searching for a glimpse of the future in these archives of lost worlds, the wearable pieces attest to the alive-ness of our cultures. Combining traditional amuletic styles with new family mythologies, playful hues and homoerotic medival Judeo-Arabic poetry, these enduring protective symbols have been transformed by our travels. I imagine we'll someday return / reunite to tell one another all about it. We still need to keep each other safe in the meantime, though.

~

Weaving futures is a series of ceremonial objects crafted to facilitate emerging and marginal Jewish ritual practices. Through the act of imagining alternative and possible times, worlds and futures, the project works in dialogue with queer, feminist and Jewish liberationist frameworks to uncover the potential for Judaica design interventions to facilitate practices which may or may not yet fully exist.

In a process which draws on braided Havdalah candles and challah bread, the pieces are initially woven from candle wicks and dipped in beeswax, then cast in bronze and silver-plated. The full series consists of a Natla (hand-washing cup), a Tzedakah (charity / justice) box, joined Shabbat candlesticks and a 10-dish Seder plate set.

Judaism is not static – as our traditions, cultures and rituals shift / rush / seep through our worlds like water, the project anticipates future movements, leaving the door open for possibility. While the objects are non-prescriptivist, some of the emerging and marginal rituals they respond to include transgender ablution rituals, embedding new symbolic foods in the Pesach meal, and honouring all found family connections in the lighting of two Shabbat candles.

Mika Benesh is an emerging artist, writer and designer working on unceded Gadigal and Dharug Country. Broadly speaking, he traces relationships between cultural institutions and archives, Jewish material cultures, queer and trans lives & movements, white supremacy and settler colonialism. Across his practice, Mika is interested in catching a small hold of many Jewish futures.

A Finalist of the 66th Blake Prize, Mika is interested in facilitating emerging & marginal Jewish ritual practices through Judaica-object design. At the moment he’s making protective amulets. As well as writing, Mika works in metal, graphite, zines, print and textiles.

Some spaces, organisations and publications which have presented Mika’s work include Craft ACT, the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Runway Journal, the National Association for the Visual Arts and Pari. In 2021 he was a New Voices Fellow in partnership with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. In September 2022 Mika will be comencing a Master of Arts (Judaic Studies) at Concordia University, Tio'tia:ke / Montreal.

Serwah Attafuah: Artist Statement & Bio

I use my past oil painting knowledge, inspiration and experience to now realize my concepts through 3D digital art.

I use techniques such as modelling, sculpting, animation and vfx to create otherworldly places and characters that reflect self.

Serwah Attafuah is a multidisciplinary artist and musician based on Dharug land/West Sydney, Australia. She creates surreal cyber dreamscapes and heavenly wastelands, populated by afro-futuristic abstractions of self with strong ancestral and contemporary themes.

Serwah has collaborated and been commissioned by clients including Mercedes Benz, Nike, Maison Valentino, Bacardi, Adobe, Paris Hilton and Charli XCX. Recent notable achievements include her participation in Sotheby's 'Natively Digital': A Curated NFT auction and 'Apotheosis': a live motion capture experience with Soft Centre at The Sydney Opera House, and winning Best Artist in the FBI Radio SMAC 2021 awards.

Samantha Jade: Artist Statement & Bio

Samantha Jade (b.2000) is an Australian artist living and working on Gadigal land within Eora Country (Sydney, NSW). Her practice investigates how photography can offer non-human entities agency and space to create their own narratives and document lived experiences, particularly through cameraless processes. Her work explores the potential for and importance of sympoiesis (making-with) with non-human beings, through the lens of the garden. The ‘garden’ in this sense is not a literal portion of land, but a metaphysical space that harbours worlds other than our own, offering exchange with non-human persons, their communities, their perspectives, and their processes. Through an ecofeminist lens, the camera can be understood as a further extension of human domination over nature, a tool that reduces the existence of natural worlds to their aesthetic value. For this reason, cameraless photography offers a way to document and converse with such worlds that negates this act of silencing. Drawing upon cameraless images and their relationship to invisible truths, Jade foregoes the camera to translate the unseen presence of the garden and its inhabitants, documenting authentic and otherwise hidden conversations, exchanges, and world-making processes ingrained within the silver-gelatine emulsion of film. The artist uses the organic materiality of film to directly engage with micro and macro-organisms and their associated environments; the invisible processes of consumption, decomposition, and chemical exchange are not just imprinted onto the film surface but become an intrinsic part of the film itself. In this way, Jade enters into collaboration with these unseen worlds, offering a kind of authorship and autonomy to their silenced persons. The artist, the film, and the garden are in constant conversation, exploring the ways in which photography can facilitate and encourage a form of ecological citizenship between worlds.

Samantha Jade is an Australian-born artist living and working in Eora/Sydney. She completed a Bachelor of Fine arts at the National Art School in Sydney (2022), and is continuing her studies with a Master of Fine art (photomedia) also at NAS. She is the recipient of the Joel Corrigan Memorial Photography Award and the Standish & Co Scholarship. Her work is held in private collections in Sydney and Geelong. 

Paula do Prado: Artist Statement & Bio

Abya Yala is a Guna word, now commonly used to refer to central and south america in the same way that Turtle Island is used to refer to north america. This woven work is a meditation on reframing place beyond the colonial map and its political borders. Place is both physical and spiritual, outlined by natural formations, mountain ranges, waterways, portals, celestial formations and the life and spirits that inhabit those places. It is unapologetically patchworked from my own memories, ancestral connections and intersecting spiritual practices that coalesce on the lands of the Charrúa Nation where I was born. Abya Yala is my lovesong to what survives deep within the soil and the ancient connections that sustain all our replationships.  May it serve as it does for me as a reminder that there are other possibilities, other paradigms and that if we share our stories in all their complexity we might collectively find a way to imagine a place where we can be together.

Working predominantly in tejido (weaving) combining crochet, coiling and beading, Paula do Prado's practice seeks to make the invisible, visible. Her work is anchored in the intersections of her ancestral lineages and surfacing the tensions in reclaiming self/culture as a settler migrant. Her current practice-led research focuses on reclaiming ancestral and spiritual practices, plantcestors and south-south global relationships to weave new narratives.

Paula do Prado is an artist-researcher who creates tejidos (weavings) as an active form of reclaiming, remembering and resisting. Her practice surfaces the intersections of her West and South African Bantu, Iberian and Abya Yala ancestral heritage. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, First Class Honours (Textiles) and a Master of Fine Arts (Research) from the University of New South Wales Art & Design. She has exhibited in various solo and group shows in Australia and overseas. In 2021, she held two solo exhibitions including pallay yuyay: to gather to remember at Verge Gallery in Sydney and Kuña/Womxn at Bankstown Art Centre. The beginning of 2022 has seen her take up an Artist Residency awarded by The Australian Tapestry Workshop in Boon Warung/South Melbourne. She is currently a PhD candidate at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

Lottie Braun: Artist Statement & Bio

"Presentiment, a feeling which haunts. World of uncanny signs. A secret language shared with the spirits of trees, sea, wind, and animals. The supernatural presence in things. The shock of waking to other realities— same world, new eyes. A language that speaks of what is other". - El cenote / The Dreampool  Gloria Anzaldua

As she grapples with her cultural identity as neither fully Australian or fully Papuan, Lottie searches for home through layers of paint and clay, intuitively building up and taking away until her own full yet intangible world appears. She paints to create landscapes that call to find peace in the feeling of being lost and is an ode to the undying hope we all have in our individual journeys to belonging and feeling whole.

Lottie Braun (b. 1998) is a Papua New Guinean-Australian artist practicing on Gadigal Land of the Eora Nation. Graduating in 2021 with a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts from the National Art School, Lotties work has been exhibited in various galaries across the region. Her practice uses painting, sculpture, installation and video to explore a lifelong personal pursuit to reconnect with her lost Papuan heritage.

Her haptic work meditates on faint memories and fantasies of another homeland. Playful motifs emerge out of layers of clay and oil paint. As the fragments accumulate, Lottie builds a utopia which expresses her deep yearning to belong, embracing the duality of two worlds colliding through the vessel of one little life.

Garden Reflexxx and Stelly G: Artist Statement & Bio

Memoriabilia, by Garden Reflexxx and Stelly G

For A Place Where We Can Be Together, Garden Reflexxx and Stelly G present Memoriabilia; a multi-media living room installation presenting their affinity for family sharing and home moviemaking.

This work includes a printed image from Smoker's Break: Depersonalisation, Stelly (2021), a video retrospective called Stelly Movie (2022) played on loop, a suspended blanket woven by Belinda Eades, five hanging keychains featuring frames of previous films, and furniture stripped from the real life living room of the makers. In Memoriabilia, Garden Reflexxx and Stelly G Pirate Bay an idea from gay direct-photographer Wolfgang Tillmans as an abundant offering to their friends. Keepsakes, merchandise, memorabilia - a way to find the keys to your home and heart.

One part of a Fijian homecoming tradition Sevusevu can involve loading up bootlegged movies to give out to family members. Scenes, moments, seconds, poses. Memoriabilia is portable cinema by three artists in a catfight for self-presentation. The work honors the surroundings of artmaking through BTS: three people exploring their own visual grammar in relation to industry standards. 

Drawn to DVD special features, and inspired by 6 years of work, Stelly Movie plays a patchwork flashback tracking the who/what/where. Films include Caledonian Road (2016), Dark Mother (2017), Faddy: I Just Give A Damn (2017) and Number Ones (2021). Ever growing mythology of the self? Derivative copycat art? Single use containers with photos? The artists welcome associations to proclaim - after years of working - they deserve a cheap pic.

 

‘We look to memorabilia to carry us through…’

The three artists collect images. For Jen, a speculative ‘everyday’ takes iPhotography and makes it painterly. For Stelly, it’s good times with a demand for a phone charger (can someone else take a pic?). For André it’s a cheap quote, found online, screenshotted for latent inspiration. Each artist focuses on friendships, relationships, and how inseparable they are from practice. Narrative is a loaded term - for people hyperconscious of cringe art speak - yet Jen, Stelly, and André fixate on their inability to rationalize outside a daily present. Clarity is hard when there’s history involved. This is what trying looks like.

These framed stills extend the artists’ struggle with narrative and biography. Between a performance and film practice, Garden Reflexxx and Stelly G use merchandise as creative non-fiction by way of outsiders concerned with the challenge of communication. Cultural histories to the front - of Sydney living, meta-film, partying, community building, social anxiety, female friendships - these keychains are a treasure trove. A statement of bestiehood, an archive of artmaking, and above all else the process journal they never had of their ill-documented artistry. 

“It’s for our friends. Beautiful, dramatic, and so hot…”

Garden Reflexxx is an independent video collective, working within resourceful/less filmmaking specifically with untrained, queer filmmakers. This enterprise also includes a film festival, published conversations with filmmakers, a radio segment at FBi 94.5, and extensive film projects. The mission statement – coined by frequent collaborator Bhenji Ra – is ‘be vulnerable…or die’. With a focus on family and friends, each project loosens production roles - regardless of a person's experience - in order to make video poems and experimental films. GRXXX’s industry-critical ethos shows queer locations as a self-appointed arthouse, including its trappings, flourishes, and its ability to fucking liberate. Garden Reflexxx have contributed film work and shown through Seventh Gallery (2020), Liveworks Day For Night festival (Carriageworks, 2021); Dance Trans Revolution at apexart New York (2021), in collaboration with Blake Lawrence for Haunting In Kensington (FirstDraft, 2022); and as part of Slamdance (2018), IFFR (2019), Dead End Film Festival (2018 and 19) and Garden Reflexxx Presents (2019 -). They’re currently finishing a mid-length feature film due for release in 2022.

Sereima Adimate/ Stelly G is a Gadigal-based Fijian performance artist with an anti-colonial practice that foregrounds the Pacific-diaspora experience by interrogating colonial structures that have invited shame and forced us to neglect self-love, communal care, and understanding. 

“I love my people, I love myself and I am committed to the evolution of returning to a past that meets the future.” 

Stelly has performed as a solo/collaborative artist across many established institutions and galleries including Cement Fondu, Sydney Biennale, MCA, Sydney Opera House, Firstdraft, and Campbelltown Arts Centre, and performed in works with Garden Reflexxx that have shown in local and international film festivals.

Francesca Zak: Artist Statement & Bio

An excerpt taken from Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s writing Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro ‘At first la llamada (the call) is just an intangible longing, a vague yearning for form. Soon it becomes a beat pulsing subliminally. Symbolically, the calls source is the dark mother, la Llorona, the ghost of the woman wailing for the loss of her children whom she murdered, in crazed anger against a lovers betrayal. 

In her Horse aspect, la Llorona will carry you for beginning of story to finish line.’

In my dreams I have met with a figure taking the shape of a faun, with him too acting as a guide or chariot. He too takes is moulded into the form of a half man half creature as Glorias Llorona, acting as neither good nor bad but as a guiding Shepard who can step between one slippery realm and the next, lead by a hooved foot and horned head followed by human gaze and human torso, acting as a figure that can easily hide between spaces where I wouldn’t, seeing me in and out of my first and last moments with a dream.

Given to me by the faun is a necklace formed by Portunus and Cardea, god of the key and the door, and goddess of the hinge. With the necklace acting as a key in itself, a necklace with charms to be worn as preservation and navigation. The fauns body becomes a form representative of the process of individuation, seemingly meeting in that slippery in-between place, half goat half man acting as a guide between two worlds. 

Francesca Zak is an artist working on Gadigal land. She uses methods of printmaking, sculpture and drawing to find connections between ideas of memory, storytelling and disused archives. At the moment she is interested in modern mythology and thoughts of desire and longing.

Maria Wang: Artist Statement & Bio

This mix is a sonic interpretation responding to some of the themes of mythology, memory, dreams, time, and fantasy lands that are interwoven throughout the artworks of the show. I was interested in creating a soundtrack that is non-linear yet cyclical, to mimic the illogical yet intuitively-sensical narratives and timelines within our dreams.

I loved the motif of keepsakes, memorabilia, and enchanted objects present in some of the works. A locket is at once a past moment frozen in time, a future promise, a charm, a secret, a key, or a portal to an imagined world. The mix tries to embody the time-space-portal-power of these enchanted objects by hazily moving between imagined and surreal dreamscapes – a soothing fairy-tale bedtime-story flows into an eerie lullaby; a hopeful, glistering paradise fragments, shatters, and crumbles into a wistful false memory of a past perhaps never lived. 

One central feeling present throughout the mix is that of a quiet nostalgia. I guess it is reflective of the longingness and introspective aspects of envisioning future utopias – in yearning for that ‘place where we can be together’. 

Maria Wang is an emerging DJ, organiser and electronic music artist based on Gadigal land. They have been working, learning, and creating in the Australian music industry under the alias D-Grade since 2019. For Maria, sharing music is about listening, receiving, exchanging, moving, feeling, responding, and reciprocating. 

Maria first started DJing whilst living in Montreal (Tiohti:áke) in 2018. Since then, they have performed nationally in Melbourne, Canberra, Hobart, as well as internationally in New York, Montreal, Toronto, and Qingdao (China). They have collaboratively organised experimental electronic and dance music events in Montreal and Sydney, under the Vault, Datatrash, tactic and boof series. 

Recently, Maria has performed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales 2021 as part of Justin Shoulder's activation of 'AEON†: TITAN ARUM' for The National, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre 2021 for the Blake Art Prize, Dark Mofo in Hobart 2019 as part of Night Mass, Soft Centre 2019, and Melbourne Music Week 2019 and 2021. 

Lily Golightly: Artist Statement & Bio

Lily Golightly works across painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles and video. Her work is interested in concepts of collective imagining and fantasy. She is also interested in ideas of make-believe, playfulness and humour. Her work often uses images from nature in conjunction with those found in fantasy, myth and fairytale to create utopian images. Her work aims to have a softness and lightness to it, both materially or conceptually to provide comfort and calm to viewers.

Lily Golightly is an artist based in Sydney who works across painting, sculpture, textile, video and drawing. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW Art & Design in 2018 and will be completing her Honors in 2022. She has exhibited in both Australia and abroad and worked on projects for Carriageworks, Sydney Opera House & The National. She is also the founder of Flower Books.