Destination Unknown
Thursday, September 5, 2002 - Monday, November 25, 2002
"in time, her memories were not of sea and water but of the immense foreign sky, the eternal horizon"
The impetus for this exhibition comes from our wanting to work together to create an art project that stirs both an audience's imagination and their conscience. We both share the desire to counter antagonisms and fears directed towards asylum seekers in this country.
Zoe Ali's photographs of the Australian landscape and Christos Tsiolkas' text about
longing and exile, asks an audience to reflect on the meaning of journey and destination.
Citylights provides an ideal context for our work. Centre Place being a popular thoroughfare in the city itself, allows us to reach out beyond the art-informed audience and this is imperative for this work's argument, discourse and relevance.
For generations the Australian horizon has been imbued with hopeful migrationary narratives of freedom. The images from Destination Unknown came from Zoe Ali's travels~ throughout South Australia, in particular her journey to Woomera.
Though the subject itself is harsh and unrelenting, Zoe's photographs imbue the land with a tender beauty.
Christos' novels and plays deal with the myriad levels of exile.
Citylights, by being an art- space right in the middle of metropolis, offers us a unique opportunity to address an urban audience with archetypal imagery of the Australian landscape, and to ask questions of exclusion and belonging to this land.
We hope that the work will also offer our urban viewer a moment of stillness in which to contemplate their own relationship to exile and territory.
Independently we both wanted to make an imaginative response to the detention of refugees at Woomera. We have come together as artists, and as friends, because we believe that it is through the integration of our disciplines that we can best give voice the vast subject of exile.
