Exhibition
Isle of Refuge
Opening: 5.30-7.30pm Thursday 12 June by David Bitel, President, Refugee
Council of Australia
Exhibition Talk: 1.00pm Thursday 12 June - Ivan Dougherty Gallery
12 June - 19 July
IVAN DOUGHERTY GALLERY
Isle of Refuge highlights the plight of asylum seekers in detention
centres in Australia and the South Pacific.
Isle features artworks by 13 prominent Australian visual artists united
in their opposition to the recent treatment of refugees by the
Australian government. Through painting, installation, sculpture and
video, the artists have engaged with issues including: the conditions
inside the detention centres, the children overboard affair, the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, their own experiences of refugeehood, and the
history of former refugee arrivals who now form an integral part of the
Australian community.
Many of the artists came to Australia as a result of war and political
or racial persecution. Chinese-Vietnamese artist My Le Thi, who is both
one of the curators and an exhibitor in Isle, has been visiting the
Villawood Detention Centre for some months now, where she has been
encouraging detainees to work through their trauma by creating artworks
for the exhibition.
George Gittoes, painter and maker of the documentary "Tales from a
Suitcase" (screened on SBS TV), will exhibit works he produced as a
result of his experiences in pre and post-war Afghanistan. These
confronting images give us a powerful sense of some of the conditions
Afghan refugees have fled, and those to which they fear to return.
Indigenous Australian painter Gordon Bennett's take on these issues is
slightly different. He says his overpowering feeling of empathy with the
detained refugees comes from the fact that Aboriginal people have a deep
historical understanding of the reality of imprisonment - both in the
physical sense of internment but also in the psychological sense of
being excluded, reviled and isolated.
Meanwhile, Reg Mombassa (Chris O'Doherty) takes a much more satirical
perspective on the situation through works such as his "Australian Jesus
Welcomes the Boat People", as well as his representation of himself as a
nerdy, thick-accented, gumboot-wearing refugee from New Zealand to
Australia.
What emerges most strongly from the show is a sense of how Australia has
been an invaluable isle of refuge for many of the exhibitors, and the
determination of all that it should continue to offer refuge to those in
need now and in the future.
Artists: Gordon Bennett, George Gittoes, Tim Johnson + Karma Phuntsok,
Chris O'Doherty aka Reg Mombassa, Sue Saxon + Anne Zahalka, Laurens Tan,
My Le Thi, Albertina Viegas, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, Guan Wei, Mahmoud
Yekta
Curators: Ashley Carruthers, Rilka Oakley and My Le Thi
For further information, please contact Rilka Oakley at Ivan Dougherty
Gallery
TEL: 9385 0726 [EMAIL PROTECTED] cnr Albion Ave & Selwyn St Paddington NSW
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