ABOUT
ELHAM ESHRAGHIAN-HAAKANSSON
Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson (she/her) is an award-winning Iranian-Australian researcher, director, and video artist. Her arena of work centers itself within communal and collaborative social practice. Her research navigates inherited stories and postmemory felt by displaced community through the poetics of the moving image. She invites viewers to become the 'witness' rather than the 'passive bystander', examining empathy in film poems, and immersive multi-media experiences facilitating a critical discussion surrounding empathy, custodianship, compassion, and social change. She has collaborated with multiple art organizations, such as Spaced, Next Wave, Victoria Park Community Centre, PICA, Community Arts Network, Immerse Australia, Co3 Dance Contemporary and Encounter theatre. Her work has exhibited nationally and internationally, receiving numerous prestigious art awards for her video installations such as the 2018 Dr. Harold Schenberg Art Prize, 2020 Invitation Art Prize, 2020 14th Arte Laguna Special Prize Award and the 2022 Ellen José Art Prize as well as a recipient for the inaugural Early-Career Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowship 2022 with the Forrest Research Foundation. Her artistic values prioritize agency, empathy and legacy advocating for community arts programs, as co-founder of the Second Generation Collective, which seeks to bridge intergenerational gaps, navigating trauma and communal care.
Critics Choice 2024 Kelly Fliedner for Art Magazine 2024
CREATIVE TEAM
Elliott Nieves
Director of Photography | www.elliottnieves.com
SECOND GENERATION COLLECTIVE
The Second Generation Collective explore stories of refugee-ship, migration and identity in Boorloo. Founded by Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson and Asha Kiani in 2020, the artists comprise of migrants who fled Iran during the 1979 Revolution, and their children who have grown up on Noongar Boojar. The collective explores their experiences of displacement, resettlement, heritage, home, grief, and faith. Against the backdrop of dual identity, they confront the push and pull of cultures in order to uncover the past and embrace the present. By acknowledging communal traumas and bridging intergenerational gaps, their thoughtful multi-disciplinary artforms evoke an empathic lens within the viewer.
Through a lens of authentic curation and communal care, Kiani and Eshraghian-Haakansson created this initiative by engaging with philosophies that ask: how can we live as a complex, unified whole, where differences are embraced, and diversity is celebrated? How do we create a compassionate foundation from which our truths are heard and acknowledged? What does it take to truly understand the process of healing in our communities?
The projects and artworks that emerge from the Collective aim to untangle the fragments of what it means to listen and understand moments of suffering, hardship, hope and faith in the human experience; to embrace the universality of grief and normalise expressing our truths so that xenophobia, estrangement and apathy are replaced with connection, empathy and oneness.
www.secondgenerationcollective.com
Photography Duncan Wright