Brown Pillars II
29 November 2025 - 18 January 2026
Curator:
Artist: Aida Azin
Artists:
Location: Boadle Hall
Brown Pillars is an ongoing body of work by artist Aida Azin that interrogates colonial hierarchies within the arts. First presented in 2017 at Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, where it critiqued institutional racism in the art world, the project now returns to Incinerator Gallery in 2025 to examine cultural production and labour relations shaped by the Global South.
Drawing on her experiences as a ‘third culture kid’ of Filipino-Iranian heritage on Aboriginal lands, Aida’s practice develops through studio painting, journal writing, and community conversations. Her work reflects on the fragmented, non-linear nature of diasporic experience, shaped by the ongoing processes of learning, unlearning, and reconnecting.
Aida Azin is a painter, art facilitator, and community organizer focusing on connecting with community and culture. Her work explores the intersections of identity, heritage, and place, reflecting her experiences as a ‘third culture kid’ of Filipino-Iranian heritage. Her artworks develop through studio painting, journal writing, and community conversations, sharing stories about the fragmented process of learning and understanding. Blending bold colours, storytelling, exaggerated forms, and expression, her style uses popular iconography and text, including images from food packaging, to symbolize observations on representation for people of her background in the West.
Brown Pillars has been featured in Art Collector Magazine (2019) and on ABC TV's Artworks (2023). It has had multiple iterations, including a solo exhibition at First Draft Gallery, NSW (2019) and the Wyndham Art Gallery art prize (2022). In 2024, it was exhibited in ‘Ina, Mata, Asucena’ at Sandimen Cultural Center, Taiwan, with support from the Philippine and Taiwan cultural ministries and a Kacalisian Artist Village residency. In 2019, Azin co-founded the Saluhan Collective, an ecology of creatives between Australia and the Philippines, creating intercultural spaces for creativity and community through events, exhibitions, residencies, and workshops. Recognized for her contributions to the art community, she was selected for Adelaide Experimental Contemporary’s SA Artist Survey (2020) and presented at the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair.
Since 2014, Azin has exhibited in galleries including Project 20 (PH), Praxis, Nexus Gallery, Ace Open, Bus Projects, FELT space, Blindside, and Firstdraft. Represented by Ames Yavuz Gallery, she is preparing for an exhibition at Nanhai Gallery, Taipei City, Taiwan, in July 2024. Azin resides between Australia and the Philippines.
Friday, 28 November, 6-8pm
The opening night, with speeches and a Welcome to Country, will be held at Incinerator Gallery alongside exhibitions ...and there's no one around to hear it and Ako ay may kaibigan, kasama ko kahit saan (I have a friend; where I go, they go).