Who’s Afraid?: Emilie Syme-Lamont & Safak Gurboga
12 May 2023 - 9 July 2023
Curator:
Artist(s): Emilie Syme-Lamont, Safak Gurboga
Location: Boadle Hall
Who's Afraid? brings together two artists, Safak Gurboga and Emilie Syme-Lamont to explore themes of displacement, fear, and cultural structures.
Safak’s work, The Big Bad Wolf and 1938 draws on the artist's personal experiences of displacement and Kurdish diaspora, referencing a specific event of Kurdish massacre in Türkiye in the late 1930s. The oversized depiction of the wolf serves to reclaim ownership over the monster and to speak to wider implications of crimes against humanity.
Emilie’s work, Revelations similarly uses animal motifs to explore post-colonialism, displacement, and the Gothic within the context of Australia. Her large white deer painting is a shapeshifter, both vulnerable and uninvited, and her use of museological display methods responds to scientific, religious and historical transgressions
Together, these two bodies of work create a dialogue about the cultural, political, and personal impact of displacement and fear.
Emilie Syme-Lamont (b. 1990) is a multimedia artist currently based out of Naarm / Melbourne, Australia.
Emilie borrows genre tropes from literary and cinematic Gothic traditions, such as haunted houses, ghost stories, ‘the double’ and psychologically charged spaces to inform her paintings and installations.
Emilie graduated from The National Art School in Sydney and holds an MFA in Drawing and a BFA in Painting. She has held solo exhibitions at M Contemporary (Sydney), Edwina Corlette Gallery (Brisbane) and PINCE projects (Budapest). Her body of work includes painting, drawing, ceramics, and more recently, sound, silicone, tattooing, and bookmaking. Her work is held in private collections in Australia, the USA, and Europe, and in the National Art School Archives in Sydney.
Safak Gurboga (b.1989) a political contemporary artist and asylum seeker of Kurdish origin. His work looks towards conditions in society in which racism thrives, the prevalence of violence and toxic aggression, and parallels between the treatment of each other and of our natural environment.
The opening night will be held on Friday, 12 May, 6 - 8pm at Incinerator Gallery alongside exhibitions IN THE RUINS I SEE THE FUTURE and The Machine is Working by Yvette James.
School Holiday Workshop: Who’s Afraid? (8 - 11 years)
Friday, 30 June, 10am - 12pm
Artists Emilie Syme-Lamont and Safak Gurboga present a monster-making visual arts workshop for young people exploring themes of mythology, shape-shifting, and identity inspired by their joint exhibition.