EXHIBITION OPENING: Exhibition opening: HERE&NOW16 / GenYM

The UWA Cultural Precinct and the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery invite you to the opening of

HERE&NOW16/GenYM Curated by Hamida Novakovich.

Presenting nine contemporary artists whose work is tied together by their diverse experiences of growing up Muslim in Australia.

Artists: Abdul Abdullah, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Fatima Mawas, Idil Abdullahi, Marziya Mohammedali, Nadia Faragaab, Rubaba Haider, Suzi Elhafez and Zahrah Habibullah.

This event will also mark the opening of JULIE GOUGH: COLLISIONS from the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art curated by Gemma Weston.

Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP by Monday 25 April. Both exhibition runs: 30 April - 16 July 2016



HERE&NOW16 / GenYM A firsthand look at being yound and Muslim in modern Australia.

The featured artists are (almost) all members of ‘Generation Y’, growing up or migrating to Australia in the 1990s and early 2000s, and their work reflects lives spent living with and challenging a ‘post-9/11’ construction of Muslim identity. Abdul Abdullah’s photography and Fatima Mawas’s short films starkly confront the contradictions that continue to emerge from anti-Muslim sentiments in Australia. Nadia Faragaab and Idil Abdullahi express notions of ‘Somaliness’ through domestic objects representing romantic yearnings for Somalia. Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Zahrah Habibullah and Rubaba Haider recollect delicate objects evoking childhood memories and familiar surroundings. Suzi Elhafez deconstructs concepts of Islamic ornamentation and cosmology through the senses, while Marziya Mohammedali exposes the ongoing plight of asylum seekers in Australia’s detention centres. HERE&NOW is a series of annual exhibitions at LWAG that are led by emerging curators and showcase the outstanding work of contemporary Western Australian artists.

Julie Gough: Collisions Exploring contact and colonisation with the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art.

Julie Gough is an acclaimed artist, writer and curator, participating in over 120 exhibitions since 1994. Collisions features works by Gough that examine points of contact between Australian Indigenous heritage and colonial history, often drawing from her own and her family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

The central focus of the exhibition will be a video work, Observance. Filmed over three trips to her traditional country on Tasmania’s North East Coast, the work documents her experience in the landscape. During her trips she is interrupted by groups of tourists whom she dubs ‘the descendants of the colonists’ due to their pursuit of a pristine landscape experience ‘ideally free of people’ and historical baggage. The haunting video will be juxtaposed with sculptures and prints that describe other cross-cultural encounters – less cultural exchanges than collisions.