The Invisible

Khadim Ali · Elyas Alavi · Avan Anwar Rushdi Anwar · Abdul Karim Hekmat

The Invisible

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The Invisible Khadim Ali Elyas Alavi Avan Anwar Rushdi Anwar Abdul Karim Hekmat UTS Gallery University of Technology, Sydney 3 October – 24 November 2017

Abdul Karim Hekmat, Uncertain, digital photograph, 2016

Contents

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Essays ‘The Wounded Refugee Narrative,’ by Abdul Karim Hekmat ‘Shine a Light,’ by Linda Jaivin ‘Poem by Poem, Drop by Drop: The Empathy Poems,’ by Debra Adelaide

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Poetry ‘On Bodrum Beach,’ by Danny Vendramini ‘Cedars,’ by Julie Chevalier ‘Beached Dreams,’ by Andy Kissane ‘Adrift,’by Linda Jaivin

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Artists Khadim Ali Elyas Alavi Avan Anwar Rushdi Anwar Abdul Karim Hekmat

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List of works

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Acknowledgements

The Wounded Refugee Narrative Abdul Karim Hekmat

Australia is in a period of perpetual preoccupation wherein refugees and asylum seekers coming by boat have been continuously dehumanised and demonised. They are blemished figures. They are marooned on islands in out of sight and out of mind locations. Many more are suffering in plain sight in the community with increasing mental health problems, even suicides.

In The Invisible, five artists come together to transform their refugee experiences through art. In this state of transformation, refugees are given voice and are able to heal the wound in the narrative gap that silences them. The Invisible is curated by a refugee and all the artists are refugees. There was no clear plan as to who should be included in the exhibition at the beginning; what has brought us together is our collective pain, trauma, suffering and aspiration. The Invisible offers a counter narrative to the dominant and dehumanising discourse on refugees.

The artworks in The Invisible include installation, painting, video and documents in which each artist charts their sense of displacement, loss and trauma to reflect upon the journey between homeland and host-land.

The Invisible takes its subtitle, ‘See what is not seen’ , from an 18th century poem by Hatef Esfehani whose works are concerned with love, compassion and the journey of the soul. The world of Persian poetry is imbued with stories of love, often in allegorical and human forms. The Invisible takes influence from the traditions of Kurdish and Persian poetry. Hatef writes that human love and open-mindedness can break barriers and penetrate the walls of hatred and ignorance. As Hatef writes, ‘Whatever your ear has not heard, hear that/What your eyes have not seen, see that’.

Avan Anwar, Dancing Letters, paper, dimensions variable, 2016.

The artists in The Invisible belong to two of the world’s most persecuted ethnic groups, the Kurds and the Hazaras.

Both groups have established a sizeable community in

Australia. The Hazara population in Australia arrived here after fleeing the persecution by the Taliban in late 1990s and they now number some 40,000. The Kurdish population here is smaller, around 7000, and arrived earlier after fleeing persecution in the Middle East. These communities are still searching for home. A quarter of refugees seeking asylum in Australia—who are either being held in the community or marooned in offshore centres—are from the Hazara and Kurdish communities.

The artists in The Invisible are survivors of violence and terror. We are fortunate to live in peace and security, and to have the opportunity to share our experiences through art and storytelling. Rushdi Anwar and Avan Anwar are two Kurdish artists who survived Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons attacks on Halabja in 1988. They survived because they left Halabja six months before the chemical attack but their family did not. They lost fourteen members of their families and their entire town was razed to the ground. “This chemical massacre clearly affected my art practice,” Anwar said. In his artwork, which is a response to the attack on Halabja, Rushdi uses chairs—objects designed for comfort— and burns them into deformed and charred objects, as a metaphor for displacement and abandonment of home and place. He continues, “I was too young when my home attacked by chemical weapons that had red apple fragrance. For this reason, I was determined to get out and look for other boundaries, to seek freedom.”

In the background of each artist’s work there is a site of pain, they carry the wound of displacement and the wounds of their generation of refugees. They translate the physical and psychological wounds of this violence into art.

Refugees are absent and present; they dominate the news, yet their true stories are hidden. For the most part, they are suppressed, silenced and punished. In the words of Hannah

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Arendt, refugees live in “dark times”, an era marked by the suppression of speech, evil doings and distortion of language, obscuring reality and thought.1 At the end of 19th century in Afghanistan, Khadim Ali’s grandparents survived the oppression and massacre of the Hazara population, in which 62 percent of them were killed.

Fearing for his own life in Pakistan in 2009, Khadim fled Quetta and arrived in Australia on a distinguished talent visa.

His family home was destroyed a bomb blast in 2012. Elyas Alavi was displaced as a child from Afghanistan and lived in Iran for many years before resettling in Australia in 2007. I fled the Taliban after my family member was tortured and arrested and arrived in Australia as a refugee in 2001. While other artists deal with the condition of home, my artwork is mostly centred on the refugee experience in Australia because unlike them I have gone through a detention centre and the uncertainly of life on a Temporary Protection Visa, conditions that still afflict many.

Khadim Ali’s home in Quetta was destroyed by a terrorist attack in 2012; only a pair of rugs survived. He now uses rugs as medium to tell the stories of refugees, who cross the treacherous sea to seek shelter. In a recent work, Transition/ Evacuation, 2015, shown at the 14th Lyon Biennale, Khadim painted demons on a capsized boat which rested on a rug left behind in Kabul by an Afghan refugee who drowned on the way to Europe, where his odyssey ended. Khadim’s largescale, 2017 commission at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), The arrivals of demons, makes reference to the naming of refugees as ‘illegal boat arrivals’. The mural acts as a metaphor for how their arrival is played out in the public imagination, fuelled by political rhetoric which stokes public fear. “There is a lot of generalization and stereotypes about refugees as if they have no country, no culture or identity,” Khadim told me. “My work does not resemble anyone. They

are refugees; they are marginal groups, we label them as the ‘other.’”

In his work in The Invisible, Khadim again turns his gaze on refugees. Untitled (from The Arrivals series) depicts demons on a boat, the work becomes visual evidence of how he and his people, the Hazaras, were demonised for over a century in Afghanistan and how this demonization continues for them as refugees in Australia. Having made a boat journey myself in 2001—during which I was exposed to demonization post Tampa and September 11—I can see how we were portrayed as a threat to national security.

Khadim is also inspired by the stories he heard from his grandfather in childhood of Hazara expulsion from Afghanistan to Pakistan, of his own migration experience in Iran, and his encounter with the Taliban. These narratives and histories all influence the way he makes his art, blending old traditions with contemporary themes. His painting infuses century-old suffering and discrimination of the Hazara, which continues today and echoes in diaspora.

Despite displacement being associated with loss, the artists in this exhibition try to reconnect with the past, presenting work that speaks of two cultures and, most importantly, dealing with these traumas. Refugees lose everything. This includes their homes and their occupations, stripping them of the familiarity of daily life and their confidence in the world. Displacement does not just happen geographically, it also occurs at the level of language.

“Linguistic dispossession,” Eva Hoffman writes in Lost in Translation, is traumatic too, “[It] is close to the dispossession of one’s self.”2 It is traumatic to not be able to articulate yourself or to express feeling of loss in another language. All that is engrained in your body is lost and broken. In the words of Maulana Rumi, a reed may be cut off from the reed-bed, but it can still wail.3

Listen to the story told by the reed, of being separated.

Since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound Kurdish artist Avan Anwar engages us with her work on the level of language, transforming Kurdish poetry into a visual image, an object to be seen, with a beauty to be appreciated. By changing the order of the letters, she renders the text incomprehensible, a sign of a person linguistically displaced. In the essay We Refugees, Arendt states that this linguistic loss denies people of “the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures and the unaffected affections”.4 As somebody who was displaced from the bed of her rich culture, Avan says she finds inspiration in the work of poets to deal “with despair and nostalgia.” For the installation work, she selects the poem of 19th century Kurdish poet, Nali, who lived in exile and whose poetry deals with the estrangement of exile and the longing for home.

“As a displaced person myself, I have experienced a dramatic change in my language,” she said. “To be more precise, my language has not only been transformed but it has, in many ways, found itself discarded within a new cultural context.’ Avan disrupts the word order in which Kurdi is written and does not follow any pattern, to emphasize how a person who has lost language finds meaning.

The Invisible takes us beyond Australian sovereign ego to the places from which refugees flee, where violence is part of everyday reality. Rushdi Anwar produced new work from a

four-month trip to his home Kurdistan/Iraq, where 1.5 million refugees were displaced by IS and now live in camps. The notion of place and displacement (2017) is a tent reconstructed from the raw materials of a standard issue UNHCR tent, in which eight people would live in the camp. He worked with school-aged children in the camp to inscribe their names on the tent fabric. In contrast to refugees identified as numbers in Australian detention centres, he has given them a name, thus an identity and a face. “Refugees often don’t have names,” Rushdi said. “I asked them to write their names” When he came back to Australia, a person asked whether he felt safe among the refugees. Puzzled, he asked, “What kind of question is that?” He then said, “they are not criminal; they are like me and you. The media and politicians portrayed them as such.”

Rushdi’s Unprotected (2017) is a series of photographs he took in the camps and had printed onto thin board. He then sent these as postcards without any envelope or packaging, from the camp to his home address in Australia. Each postcard bears the stamps and marks of its journey. These scratches on the images stand in metaphorically for the refugee, who crosses borders and in the process is physically and mentally wounded.

Elyas Alavi, an award winning poet and multi-disciplinary artist, draws us to the condition of his home country. Elyas’s artistic focus has been mostly within cultural diaspora and emotional homelessness. He expressed his longing for home for many years through poetry, since he was uprooted from Afghanistan, referencing a famous Rumi poem that states “anyone who has remained far from his roots, seeks a return to the time of his union”. Elyas turned to the visual arts because he could not find an audience through his poetry in a new culture; he makes his art to chart his refugee journey and life. In an unpublished poem, Elyas writes,

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Australia, Australia I was not borne in you and the hand prints of my father don’t show on your trees but are my homeland and you are safe like my mother’s far embrace.

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“Poetry and poetic thought has been a significant part of my creative practice for a long time,” Elyas says, “and there are numerous crossovers between poetic writing and imagery embodied in my art works.” On a trip to Kabul in August 2016, Elyas was caught in a bomb blast in which 90 Hazara protestors were killed and over 300 injured. He survived to tell the stories of those who died, through painted portraits on glass from images taken of the protest and through video in which he followed the families of those left behind. Fading Faces (2017) expresses a form of duality, expressed a marz (border) in Farsi, between life/ death and violence/beauty. His works are poignant reminders of the danger the Hazara face still in Afghanistan, and the state of mourning that affects the community in Australia.

The Invisible also brings to light the perils of refugees in Nauru, who fled violence and terror in their home countries, only to face daily terror and violence on the island. Those on

Nauru live in “a state of exception”5 where Australia places them beyond the protection of the law. The virtual blackout imposed by the Australian Government has made it difficult for the general public to grasp what is happening to these individuals. For over a year, I have worked with refugees on Nauru, interviewing them by long distance, obtaining some video footage to break the silence. Many of whom are psychologically broken and physically distraught. Refugees in this situation are victims of statesanctioned violence, when this violence enters the public realm it is rendered banal.

Included in this catalogue is a selection of poetry from The Empathy Poems, a project supported by UTS’s Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, which asks people to take a famous or muchloved poem and rewrite it in order to express the experiences or concerns of refugees. Inspired by John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’, Danny Vendramini writes about Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler washed up on the shore of Turkey in 2015.

On Bodrum Beach my body lies Washed ashore, amid the cries, Of strangers strolling by; and in the sky, As seagulls squawk and sound alarm A policeman takes me in his arms.

In her accompanying powerful essay, “Poem by poem, drop by drop: the Empathy Poems,” Debra Adelaide, novelist and UTS academic, speaks of the power of empathy that poetry creates.

“Compassion fatigue is all around us,” Debra writes. “Indeed the current refugee crisis, in which it is estimated that one in 113 people around the world is now a refugee, surely means that compassion should guide policies and help find solutions.”

Novelist and essayist Linda Jaivin contributes a poignant essay to this catalogue on how art can change people’s perceptions about refugee issues: “Art can shine a light into spaces made

dark by misinformation, ignorance, and misunderstanding, to give form and substance to such confounding abstractions as ‘displacement’ and ‘flight’,” Linda writes, “and to illuminate the human faces obscured by numbers and headlines.”

In the book of Shahnama, an epic poem composed by Ferdowsi in the 11th century. A central protagonist in Shahnama is Rostam, whose evil deeds, arrogance and thirst for power are sharply contrasted with Kay Khosorrow, who represents love, generosity and justice. As much as Ferdowsi portrays demon kings in his book, he also portrays the demons of our inner selves and the presence of deceit and evilness in people.

Khadim Ali takes inspiration from Shahnama and how our world is connected to the fantasy world. In modern times, we can find the heroes of Shahnama replaced by today’s rulers like Donald Trump, Pauline Hanson and Peter Dutton who have come to represent contemporary demons.

The Invisible hopes to transcend difference, to create dialogues and understanding between refugees and the public and to highlight commonalities rather than differences. We should not be the subject of vilification or stigmatisation or indeed as passive victims but as creators and artist who can contribute to and be part of the Australian community. The Invisible allows the visitor to enter the space of refugee trauma, and invites them to join in suffering, sorrow, joy and compassion with others to form a shared human community.

Abdul Hekmat is the curator of The Invisible and is one of the exhibiting artists.

Hannah Arendt, a Jewish political theorist, wrote the book Men in the Dark Times, in the 1960s to address the legacies of mass displacement of Jews left in the wake of the Second World War and human suffering in general.

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Hoffman, E. (1990). Lost in translation. New York: Penguin Books.

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi was a 13th century Persian Mystic poet whose poetry transcended national borders in its descriptions of human compassion and empathy. The nay poem (reed poem) is the opening of the prologue of Book 1 of Mathnawi and is popularly known about the Persian speakers. The poems continues like this:

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Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say/Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back/At any gathering I am there, mingling in the laughing and grieving/a friend to each, but few will hear the secrets hidden Arendt was also a refugee who was displaced by the Nazi regime and sought asylum in the United States. Although she has written many books, including the Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, that describe the conditions of the time, she wote of her own experience but once, in the essay ‘We refugees.’

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Georgio Agamben, State of Exception, University of Chicago Press, 2003.

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Shine a Light Linda Jaivin

Rushdi Anwar, The Notion of Place and Displacement, paint, UNHCR tent fabric, safety pins, wood frame, and HD video one channel, dimensions variable, 2017 (detail).

Can art change the world? Picasso’s Guernica, one of the most powerful anti-war works of art ever made, didn’t stop new wars from breaking out. That’s despite the fact that most people know that war is bad. Art that protests the systematic ill-treatment of refugees – an issue on which opinion is far less united – is unlikely to end that abomination for once and for all either.

What art can do is to shine a light into spaces made dark by misinformation, ignorance, and misunderstanding, to give form and substance to such confounding abstractions as ‘displacement’ and ‘flight’, and to illuminate the human faces obscured by numbers and headlines. Armed conflicts, famines and persecution have today driven 65 million people from their homes, many of them forced to cross national borders in search of safe haven. It is the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War, made worse by the kind of cruel policies and vilifying rhetoric such as promoted by our own government, which with the connivance of so much of the media has sown enough seeds of doubt to plant whole fields of indifference.

Artists and writers in Australia and around the world have reflected on the crisis in a great outpouring of work as diverse as it is heartfelt: Human Flow, the recent film by Ai Weiwei; the haunting marble sculptures of lifejackets, lifeboats and oars carved by Australian artist Alex Seton; and the smart and cheeky political art of Deborah Kelly and boat-people.org, who in 2002 projected an image of the First Fleet and the words ‘boat people’ on the sails of the Opera House, are just a few examples.

What is unique, compelling and important about this latest exhibition of refugee-themed art is not only that it features work by refugee artists, but it is curated by a refugee, Abdul Hekmat, a writer, journalist, photographer and artist as well. In The Invisible, refugee artists are the ones holding up the light.

They come from two of the most persecuted peoples on earth, the Kurds and the Hazaras. Each has unique preoccupations, strategies and visions: Rushdi Anwar’s hand-made postcards

and patched tent, on which children in an Iraqi refugee camp inscribed their names forces us to consider the individual children whose lives are first cruelled by wars and conflict, and then toyed with by refugee policies such as our own.

Khadim Ali paints the demons that others see when they look at refugees like him, Avan Anwar addresses the loss of culture and language, Elyas Alavi’s work speaks of the fragility of life and Abdul Karim’s photographic and video work illuminates the life of asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru about which our government would prefer to keep us in the dark. These intelligent and deeply felt works may give solace and voice to fellow refugees, bringing from invisibility to visibility and from object to subject.

For the rest of us, they offer the possibility of empathetic connection – and that might be just what is needed to spark change. If that sounds a trifle Panglossian, consider how recent studies in the field of cognitive science have shown that facts are of little use in persuading people to change their mind. In the field of climate change, we’ve seen how all the science in the world won’t budge a denier from his seat on the edge of the flat earth. For nearly in Australia, refugee advocates, journalists and others have been busily debunking myths and highlighting facts.

And yet Australia’s policies are today even more obstinately cruel and unjust than ever before while the Australian public, it seems, cares even less than they did in the Howard era. What the science tells us, however, is that emotions win where facts fail. In making visible the invisible, artworks like those in The Invisible help to make the unknown known, to turn the other into the familiar and in doing so, to dissipate fear, and replace it with empathy, the pathway to compassion. Art might not be able to change the world, but it can change us, and that’s a start.

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Poem by Poem, Drop by Drop: the Empathy Poems Debra Adelaide

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Krystal Campbell, 120 Drops. Identity symbol for the Empathy Poems Project, watercolour and ink, 2017

Compassion fatigue is all around us, and yet the need for compassion towards people who are persecuted and oppressed only increases. Indeed the current refugee crisis, in which it is estimated that one in 113 people around the world is now a refugee1, surely means that compassion should guide policies and help find solutions.

And yet, as the number of refugees increases, governments only seem determined to find more ways to turn them away, demonise them, brutalise them, punish them, and make them suffer even more than they have at the hands of their original oppressors. At the time of writing, the Australian government just announced its intention to cancel all the meagre welfare benefits paid to asylum seekers who are currently in this country for medical treatment.2 How do we change the hearts and minds of people in power, or anyone who seems immune to cries for justice and compassion?

The Empathy Poems project is designed to raise awareness about the plight of asylum seekers and refugees through a benign approach and by focusing on something of simple beauty: a poem. It asks people to imagine what to them is unimaginable, and to empathise with and show their support for refugees by offering a personal creative response.

The project was inspired by Ian Syson’s poem, Beach Collection, published in early 2016, which in itself was inspired

by Kenneth’s Slessor’s famous poem about human suffering in the second world war, Beach Burial. The idea is simple: people choose a poem they have an affinity with, and then rewrite or respond to it with the broad theme of refuge. Contributors to the project do not need to be poets, nor even writers: the project is open to all, and in fact some of the more beautiful and moving poems have been written by people who have confessed to never having written a poem before.

Why poetry? Because it is the perfect form to inspire

empathy amongst readers. We all learned poetry when we were very young, in the form of nursery rhymes and songs: poetry was probably our first introduction to literature, it is that fundamental to our culture. Poetry also has a long tradition of political action, and of responding to and offering insight into crises and dramas of a major, national and global nature.

Poets as diverse as Adrienne Rich, Langston Hughes, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, and, in Australia, Oodgeroo (Kath Walker), Bruce Dawe, Kate Jennings, and Graham Rowlands — to name a few — have all written powerful and moving political poetry. And poetry, like all great literature, has a habit of reinventing itself, demonstrating an endless capacity for adaptation, speaking across the generations, and across the world.

The Empathy Poems website features artwork by UTS student Krystal Campbell, who created 120 Drops as the symbol for the project. The piece features watercolour paint dripped over a hand drawn map of the world. Each of the 120 drops, invoking imagery of water and tears, symbolises 50,000 people, representing the more than 60 million people forcibly displaced globally by conflict and persecution.

www.empathypoems.com.au Charlotte Edmond, ‘The number of displaced people in the world just hit a record high’ World Economic Forum, 20 June 2017 https://www. weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/there-are-now-more-refugees-than-theentire-population-of-the-uk/

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Richard Baines, ‘Asylum seekers face welfare crackdown under Government changes’ ABC News, 27 August 2017 http://www.abc.net.au/ news/2017-08-27/asylum-seekers-income-and-accommodation-to-becut-back/8846470

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On Bodrum Beach Danny Vendramini

On Bodrum Beach my body lies Washed ashore, amid the cries, Of strangers strolling by; and in the sky, As seagulls squawk and sound alarm A policeman takes me in his arms.

I am the Dead. Short days ago I lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Boarded the boat, and now I lie On Bodrum Beach.

Show my photo to the world: That all may know, my little dreams To play with toys and go to school, Become a man and live in peace Were ended here, on Bodrum Beach.

Inspired by John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’.

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Cedars Julie Chevalier

I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a cedar.

A cedar whose hungry mouth is prest Against the earth’s sweet flowing burqa; A cedar that looks at Allah all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray; A cedar that may in summer wear A nest of thrushes in her hijab; Upon whose niqab snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by clods like me, But only Allah can make a tree.

Inspired by Joyce Kilmer’s ‘Trees’.

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Beached Dreams Andy Kissane

Silently and gladly to the reefs of Christmas Island the convoys of asylum seekers come; at night they cling to the boards of wooden boats that roll and list in heaving seas.

Between the fob and mincing of the sound bite, no-one, it seems, has time for this— to pluck them from a watery grave, wrap them in blankets and raise a glass to honour their remarkable courage, their very ordinary dreams and their right to be proudly Australian. Instead, we drive shards of broken tidewood into their beating hearts, sealed by the signature of our feckless leaders, written with such pragmatic cowardice, with such unfeeling stubbornness that the words choke as they begin—“Unknown human”— the ink bleeds and fades in a sea strewn with the wreckage of decency, the withdrawal of compassion, the failure of a nation to face its fear, to understand that, like all of us, they come in the hope of a better life.

Adrift Linda Jaivin

Adrift! So many boats adrift!

Indifference lets us down.

Will no one welcome a drift’d boat Into our hearts and towns?

News anchors say, on yesterday, One’s engine did break down, We turn it back, we turn our backs – In apathy we drown.

But we can choose another way, One that is just and fair.

We’re all adrift upon this sea, That boat is also you and me, With boundless plains to share.

Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s ‘Adrift’.

Nauru/Papua New Guinea

Inspired by Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Beach Burial’.

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Khadim Ali Khadim Ali is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across video, painting, drawing and textiles. He was born in Quetta, Pakistan, which sits on the border of Afghanistan. Ali was trained in classical miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore and in mural painting and calligraphy in Tehran. In a 2001 trip to Afghanistan he came across the long bearded figure of the Taliban who called themselves ‘Rustam of Islam,’ reminding him of the heroes of Shahnama (Book of Kings) that his grandfather had read to him as a child. He turned them into artwork showing the persecution of the Hazaras.

Following threats to his life and the loss of family members in a terrorist attack, Ali decided to come to Australia in 2001.

Ali’s paintings tell stories about loss (of his own cultural heritage and of human values) and about how meaning shifts as words and images are perverted through ideological adoption.

Over the past 10 years Khadim has exhibited widely both in Australia and overseas. In 2012 he was selected for inclusion in documenta13, where his work was shown both in Kassel, Germany and Kabul, Afghanistan. In 2009 he was included in the Venice Biennale and in 2013 was included in a major exhibition titled ‘No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia’ at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 2015 he held his first major Australian solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where he is now on the Board of Trustees.

Khadim’s work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Australian War Memorial, Art Gallery of New South Wales, QAGOMA, Brisbane, Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

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Khadim Ali, Untitled (from The Arrivals series), gouache, ink and gold leaf on wasli paper, 134 x 154 cm (6 panels), 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery. Photo credit: Carl Warner

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Elyas Alavi Elyas Alavi is a multi-disciplinary artist and renowned poet based in Adelaide, South Australia. He works primarily in painting, installation and performance art. Alavi was born in Afghanistan, and moved to Iran as a child, following the intensification of war in his homeland and in late 2007 he moved to Australia as a refugee at risk.

Alavi graduated with a Masters by Research (Visual Arts) in 2015 and a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) at the University of South Australia. He has exhibited in number of solo and group exhibitions in Australia and Afghanistan including CACSA Project Space, SASA Gallery, Nexus Arts, IFA (Kabul), Moonee Art Space (Melbourne) and Fontanelle Gallery.

Alavi also is known as an internationally renowned poet.

He published three poetry books in Iran and Afghanistan. His first poetry book “I’m a daydreamer wolf” published in 2008 in Tehran, followed by “Some wounds” in 2012 in Kabul and “Hodood” in 2015 in Tehran.

Alavi’s work and research focuses on identity, memory, migration and displacement. It explores the effects of change and the passage of time on our memories, and the internal and affective images and connections from which we are constructed. Through this research and as visual artist and displaced Hazara (a marginalised ethnic group originally from Afghanistan), his contribution through a visual art practice is one that contains his own particular experiences and contemplations on displacement.

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Left: Elyas Alavi, Mohammad Jan, video with sound, 2:25 mins, 2016-17.

Below: Elyas Alavi, Fading Faces, acrylic on glass, 33 pieces, 25 x 35cm, 2017.

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Elyas Alavi, Mohammad Jan, video with sound (installation view), 2:25 mins, 2016-17

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Avan Anwar Avan Anwar is a Kurdish Australian artist born in Halabja, Kurdistan. Her family fled the town shortly before it was destroyed by chemical weapons in 1988. She migrated to Australia in 2001, first settling in Sydney and then in Melbourne.

Avan received a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) (Honours) from RMIT University in 2016 and holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts from Institute of the Fine Arts, Sulemani, Kurdistan. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Australia, Japan, Italy, Switzerland and Kurdistan.

Her works focus on issues of identity, culture and language and how this is vulnerable to change through displacement.

Language can become insignificant, losing its functionality when dislocation and displacement occur forcibly. “The aim of my artwork is to transform text into a form,” she writes. Using the work of 19th century Kurdish poet Nali as source material, Avan translates the poetry into physical forms whose materiality is vulnerable to external forces. She explains, “His poems express a longing for a homeland which reflects the intricacies of the diaspora. In a similar way, the concept of my work shows how displacement affects artworks in different cultural contexts.”

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Left: Avan Anwar, Fragile, plaster, dimensions variable, 2016.

Below: Avan Anwar, Displacement, aluminium foil, dimensions variable, 2016.

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Rushdi Anwar Rushdi Anwar is a Melbourne-based artist originally from Kurdistan. His installation, sculptures, painting, photopainting, and video works often reflect on the socio-political issues of Kurdistan, Iraq and The Middle East. Exploring these issues through an investigation of form conditions, material vocabularies and processes, his works reference the social and political unrest in his home country and his Kurdish heritage, but they also have a broader message and talk to us of care, attention and even redemption through art.

He was educated in Kurdistan and Australia studying at the Institute of Kirkuk- Kurdistan, Enmore Design Centre / Sydney Institute- Sydney and RMIT University, Melbourne. He holds a Master of Fine Art (MFA) in Fine Arts RMIT University where he is a current candidate of Doctorate of Philosophy Art (PhD) in the School of Art. He has held solo and group exhibitions widely in Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, France, Japan, Kurdistan, Norway, Switzerland, Thailand, and United Arab Emirates.

He has been awarded grants from; Australia Council for the Arts (2016), Creative Victoria’s VicArts Grants program (2016), The Artist Project: Contemporary Art Fair, Installation Zone Toronto, Canada (2016). Australia-Thailand Institute (ATI) (2012 and 2014), Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) (2012), Australia Council for the Arts (2011), Kurdistan Regional Government through the Ministry of Arts and Culture (2010), and residencies from Ne Na Contemporary Art Space, Chiang Mai-Thailand (2012 and 2015) and Casula Powerhouse Art Centre, Sydney (2013). His works are held in collections of the Australian War Memorial Contemporary Collection in Canberra, The Kurdistan Regional Government, The Ministry of Arts and Culture, Slemani- Kurdistan and in private collections in Kurdistan and Australia.

Anwar has curated exhibitions for a group of international artists in Kurdistan (2010), Thailand (2012 and 2015), and Australia (2013) that received widespread media coverage. He is Co- founder and Co-coordinator; The Australian Thai Artist Interchange INC (ATAI) Organization Melbourne, Australia.

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Rushdi Anwar, The Notion of Place and Displacement, paint, UNHCR tent fabric, safety pins, wood frame, and HD video one channel, dimensions variable, 2017. Installation view, MARS Gallery.

Rushdi Anwar, Unprotected, unique c-type print on board, one edition each, 30 x 20cm each, 2017 (details).

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Abdul Karim Hekmat Abdul Hekmat is a writer, journalist, photographer and artist.

He was born in Afghanistan and came to Australia as a refugee by boat in 2001. He spent five months in a detention centre in Western Australia. He initially was unable to go to university under the terms of his temporary protection visa but then received a scholarship in 2004 from the University of Technology Sydney which enabled him to continue his education. He graduated with a BA Communications (Social Inquiry) Honours from UTS and is now a PhD candidate at UTS where he explores the experience of refugees through writing and arts.

Abdul works within the medium of video, photography and text. His work is informed by his refugee experience and focused on story-telling through art and writing. He has held solo exhibitions at UTS foyer gallery, ANU School of Arts, Queensland Centre for Photography, Fairfield Museum and Gallery, Nexus Gallery, University of Western Australia and group shows at RMIT gallery and Head-on Festival. He received Australian Postgraduate Scholarship Award and also funding for his writing and artwork from Copyright Agency, NSW artist grant and Create NSW and Australian Council for the Arts.

Abdul regularly writes on asylum seeker and refugee issues. He has written for the Guardian, The Saturday Paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Monthly. He won 2016 humanitarian award and was finalist for the United Nations Media Peace Prize and Amnesty Media Prize 2016. He received the UTS Alumni Award in 2012 for his work with community and refugees. He has participated in Sydney Writers Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival and Emerging Writers’ Festival. He is a board member of Refugee Council of Australia.

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Abdul Karim Hekmat, Nauru Refugee Voices, video with sound, 2017 (still).

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Source material for Nauru Refugee Voices (2017)

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Acknowledgements Abdul Karim Hekmat

List of works

Khadim Ali Untitled (from The Arrivals series) Gouache, ink and gold leaf on wasli paper 134 x 154 cm (6 panels) 2016 Elyas Alavi Fading Faces Acrylic on glass, 33 pieces 25 x 35cm 2017 Elyas Alavi Mohammad Jan Video with sound 2:25 mins 2016-17 Avan Anwar Displacement Aluminium Foil Dimensions variable 2016 Avan Anwar Dancing Letters Paper Dimensions variable 2015

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Rushdi Anwar The Notion of Place and Displacement Paint, UNHCR tent fabric, safety pins, wood frame, and HD video one channel.

Dimensions variable 2017 Rushdi Anwar Unprotected Unique c-type print on board, one edition each 30 x 20cm each One edition each (1 of 1) 2017 This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

Abdul Karim Hekmat Nauru Refugee Voices Videos with sound 2017 Creative team: Georgia Wallace-Crabbe (producer); Willy-James Bernardoff (animation); Dom Givney (music); Luke Seer Brown (animation); Jimena Puente-Trevino (editing); Tyler Mahoney, (editing); Mary Tran (editing).

Firstly I would like to thank my family, and my wife who provided love and support in this journey. I would like to warmly thank all the artists: Khadim Ali, Rushdi Anwar, Avan Anwar, Elyas Alavi, whose generosity, friendship and trust in me directed the whole project. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to UTS gallery curator, Tania Creighton for being receptive to the idea and for Eleanor Zeichner and Stella Rosa McDonald for their continued advice and support. My warm thanks for the creative team with whom I have collaborated on Nauru Refugee Voices: Georgia Wallace-Crabbe who as Producer connected people and helped bring the videos to fruition and to Willy-James Bernardoff, Luke Seer Brown, Tyler Mahoney, Jimena (Chiméne) Puente-Treviño, Mary Tran and Dom Givney for their hard work on the project. My thanks to Tim O’Connor and Paul Power from Refugee Council of Australia for their organisational partnership to The Invisible. My great thanks to STARTTS for their support. My thanks to Create NSW for funding towards The Invisible public programming. I would like thank my former supervisors, Andrew Jakubowicz and James Goodman; and current supervisors, Lucy Fiske and Debra Adelaide, whose support and flexibility and kindness allowed to work on this project. I would like to thank Debra for writing the essay and allow using some poems from the project she initiated, Empathy Poems. I would like to thank all the poets, Julie Chevalier, Andy Kissane, Linda Jaivin and Danny Vendramini for having their poems printed in the catalogue.

Danny’s poem resonated deeply with me as it was written at a time when he was caring for his loved partner, Rosie Scott, a long time refugee supporter, who died early this year and who was my dear friend. My warm thanks to Linda Jaivin, who has written about and supported refugees for many years, and writing an essay in a short time while she was in a trip to the United State to see her sick mother but committed to write the essay nonetheless. The exhibition and the catalogue were produced as a result of working and collaborating these creative, compassionate and socially concerned people, without whom it would not have been possible.

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The Invisible Khadim Ali, Elyas Alavi, Avan Anwar, Rushdi Anwar, Abdul Karim Hekmat.

Curated by Abdul Karim Hekmat.

UTS Gallery UTS Building 6 Level 4, 702 Harris St Ultimo NSW 2007

3 October – 24 November 2017

Monday – Friday 12 – 6 Saturday 12- 4 Free Admission

Catalogue essay: Abdul Karim Hekmat Catalogue contributors: Debra Adelaide, Linda Jaivin, Danny Vendramini, Julie Chevalier, Andy Kissane Catalogue design: Tim Busuttil Published by UTS ART University of Technology Sydney ISBN 978-0-6481354-1-8 Exhibition partners:

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