Ellen José Art Award for young women
edges of place
2022, three-channel installation, 4k with sound, 17:00min.
Joint Winner of the Ellen Jose Art Award 2022 The two artists who jointly share the inaugural Ellen José Art Award for young women are Moorina Bonini, for her video work Gowidja (After) 2021 and Elham Eshragian-Haakansson for her audio-visual installation edges of place 2022.
"We have elected to share the Award amongst two artists, in recognition of two outstanding and especially sophisticated works. We found it difficult to elevate one above the other, for they both have undeniable power and complexity, and historical and emotional gravitas, and show great promise from two young artists in the early stages in their career."
"As was the case in the work of Ellen José, both artists combine rich poetry with powerful politics, in both form and content. Both works engage archival and public histories which they movingly entwine with their own family histories and personal narratives."
"In very different and specific ways, both works attest to histories of people being dislocated and displaced from their homelands.... Another creates rich emotional landscapes from the ruinous violence of fundamentalism, the experience of homelessness, and the complexities of geography and history. Both works employ very sophisticated contemporary modes of collage in the assemblage and animation of cultural artefacts so that they resonate in the present. In each case we are witness to specific cultural contexts and histories which have wider, universal resonance."
They commended how the work provided strong and evocative reflection upon displacement as well as the histories and realities of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing persecution. As for the Ellen José Art Award, an exhibition in honour of Torres Strait Elder, Ellen José (1951-2017) pioneer in Australia’s urban Indigenous art movement, radical activist and social justice campaigner – the judges, Max Delany (ACCA) and Professor Marcia Langton AM, Associate Provost at the University of Melbourne commented,
“…Eshraghian-Haakansson’s installation translates the violence of fundamentalism, the experience of homelessness, and the complexities of geography and history into rich emotional landscapes… As was the case in the work of Ellen José, both artists combine rich poetry with powerful politics.”
