Kaya. (hello in Noongar)

I began to reflect on what welcoming means, especially the complexities of what it means to welcome on stolen land. For so many of us, our presence is one of unease, where we live in the liminality of this space, somewhere between welcome and go back to where you came from, between finding the safety of home and the horrors of detention, of looking to a bright future while acknowledging that we arrived here on the backs of still unspeakable massacres.

Around us, we have stories, each piece carrying with them a rich lineage that goes beyond the artist themselves and addresses a collective history as well as holds a mirror up to ourselves. Mostly, the pieces evoke life ... The migrations of not just people but of spirits, animals, land, thoughts, cultures, traditions. They speak of hope for a safer future, while holding anger at what has happened, a sorrow for those whose voices have been silenced. Sitting as garlands do, around our necks, we may feel them as heavy as the albatross or as light as butterflies, as painful as barbed wire, or as gentle as ladybugs as they wander.

Sitting as they do, around our necks, they become a platform for voices that sometimes are, As Arundhati Roy says, “not voiceless but deliberately silenced or preferably unheard” The pieces here become acts of resistance, a way of embodying the rolling emotions of discovering identities that themselves have been lost or stolen - I myself have chosen my own neckpiece as a nod to the culture that I have been disconnected from by death and displacement. Resistance can be loud and violent, pushing back against occupation, but it also can be in continuing to exist, defying the erasure of our identities and ourselves, and in reaching out via shaky fingers through the links of physical and metaphorical fences and breaking through the borders of unwelcome.

In opening this exhibition today, I would like you to reflect on the pieces around us, and how these are artefacts of identity and of intergenerational trauma, but also how they themselves are defiant, proud, hopeful, playful, shouting and whispering that another world, another existence is possible.

Thank you for inviting me to do this :) 

Marziya Mohammedali, 2022