SPACED, Know Thy Neighbour #3
(our home) خونۀ ما
Working closely with the Victoria Park Community Centre, video artist Elham Eshragian-Haakansson articulates through moving image, text, and installation, the deep complexities embedded within the experience of home/less/ness felt by the community of Victoria Park | 24 February - 25 March 2023 | Cullity Gallery
Throughout the period of her residency, Elham thoroughly consulted with St. Mary’s Outreach Service, creative arts therapist Cara Phillips, and residents within the neighbourhood, in order to respond with resonance and sensitivity to the ways in which local people have internalised the changing built landscape of Victoria Park.
Paralleling her own experiences of displacement from a migrant perspective, Elham generates a poetic language to unearth the emotional embodiment of place.
Know Thy Neighbour #3 is a provocation to the familiarity of place, asking communities to step outside of familiar engagements and locations; to seek out scenarios or contexts that defamiliarize and recontextualise "the local" for audiences, communities, or the artists themselves and ask how we can meaningfully engage in the making of our cities.
Through Know Thy Neighbour #3, the artist positions herself directly with/in the community, unravelling the themes of home/less/ness, both far away and at our doorstep. Investigating the complexities of Victoria Park's urban and social identity, she seeks to witness, absorb and poetically re-express the hidden experiences felt in her engagement with private and public spheres. Witnessing exchanges of nurture and rituals of care, the artist de-constructs the hidden social relationships through ethical and therapeutic practise, intersubjective collaboration and field work as part of Know Thy Neighbour #3, hoping to understand its memory, its presence and its transformation as a place.
Friday 24 February represented the official opening of the Know Thy Neighbour #3 exhibition at Cullity Gallery – the final culmination of the residency engagements between artists Elham Eshragian-Haakansson, Yabini Kickett, Amy Perejuan-Capone, and Olga Cironis and Duncan Wright, with their respective community partners Victoria Park, East Fremantle, Melville, and Armadale. Taking place over the span of a year, each artist worked closely with their community partner to realise a series of creative encounters routed in socially-engaged practice. While each project was specific in its own scope, the curatorial thread connecting each body of work is an investigation of the familiar. Looking at the social, cultural, and historical contexts of place and the people within it has revealed in this program a trajectory through which local residents can see themselves reflected in their places of dwelling. Instrumental to the culmination of this project, is our presenting partner, UWA School of Design who have with great dedication supported Spaced to deliver the Know Thy Neighbour #3 exhibition. - SPACED
"During her residency, artist Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson established a close relationship with the Town of Victoria Park’s Community Centre, enabling her to delve into the issues around home and homelessness. “Through ongoing conversations with the Centre, its users, and its service providers, Elham found herself circling notions of home and a displacement within it,” says [Mayma] Awaida. “Her work proposes a three-tiered perspective of home/less/ness and through poetic word and moving image, parallels the deep complexities embedded within the community of Victoria Park with her own migrant upbringing.” - Nina Levy, Seesaw Magazine