Brown Pillars
29 November 2025 - 18 January 2026
Curator:
Artist(s): Aida Azin
Location: Boadle Hall
In Brown Pillars, Aida Azin transforms the gallery into a space that critiques institutional racism within the art world, drawing attention to the nuanced experiences of diasporic identities in systems built on exclusion and appropriation. Through recurring motifs like food wrappers, Aida invokes Asian grocery stores—a place of comfort and cultural familiarity—as a counterpoint to the alienation felt in mainstream art spaces. These wrappers become symbols of contemporaneous identity, asserting the cultural richness of items overlooked or exoticized by Western audiences.
Central to the exhibition is a bamboo scaffolding structure, which serves as both a literal and symbolic framework. The grid-like form nods to European Modernism, while the bamboo represents the labor and creativity of non-Western communities whose contributions have been systematically erased. Here, Aida dismantles the notion that modernity belongs solely to the West, challenging the Western art canon’s history of cultural appropriation and its voyeuristic fascination with “the other.”
Through these structures and symbols, Brown Pillars celebrates contemporaneous, multicultural identities, subverting tokenism by foregrounding cultural pride and resilience. Aida critiques the West’s selective inclusivity while championing the dynamic voices and histories that resist its reductive gaze.
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).