Loss, language and love: How young Australian artists are navigating cultural dislocation

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Metal shields that shimmer with watery patterns; a shell-encrusted grotto made from an old fishing boat; a film about a cow and girl who are both named Monica; a floor of nearly 4,000 hand-cast paving stones that clink underfoot; and a series of silk curtains inked with stories and pastel hues. These are some of the pieces you will encounter should you visit ‘Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, an annual exhibition featuring artists aged 35 years and under.  

Each of the artists in this year’s edition “are turning to materiality and form to record their personal and familial stories,” says curator Lucy Latella. This intimate curatorial focus emerged from Latella’s “interest in the potential of an artistic practice to navigate feelings of loss and to forge pathways for deeper cultural connection,” she explains.  

The shell-encrusted boat shrine, sinners grotto (2023) by Teresa Busuttil, for example, comes from a deeply personal place. The artist spent hour after cathartic hour creating the sculpture in an ode to her late father. It speaks of his labour as a fisherman as well as his sea voyage immigrating from Malta to Australia many years ago.  

Busuttil’s other smaller-scale sculptures—Jesus was a Capricorn (2024), Over Sea (Self Portrait) (2024) and Isimghu (Listen) (2024)—similarly blend a mixture of emotions and references. Pop-cultural icons, such as an image of Madonna, sit alongside mosaicking and Catholic iconography to explore the various influences of her Maltese Australian heritage.

While these reference points and stories are unique to Busuttil, the kitschy tourist souvenir aesthetic she employs is familiar and the pink and blue lighting playfully adds to a sense of fun and warmth that intermingle with her grief and discomfort. “There are often broader entry points to deeply personal works for audiences to reflect on and draw their own associations,” says Latella. 

Aidan Hartshorn’s artwork Yiramir Mayiny (River People) (2024), also deals with loss, drawing on his family history as a Walgalu (Wolgal/Wolgalu) and Wiradjuri man to offer a lesser-known counter narrative to the history of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. Constructed between 1949 and 1974, ‘the scheme’ is often lauded as one of Australia’s most successful nation-building projects and is soon to be upgraded in a project titled Snowy Hydro 2.0. However, behind this story of success is another soaked in sadness. The dam was built on sacred sites of the Walgalu people, meaning that Hartshorn’s family and community have limited access to these culturally significant places due to controlled dam levels.

Hartshorn’s four diamond-shaped shields, made in industrial aluminium and printed with photographs of the water that is discharged by the Snowy Hydro plant, convey this layering of co-existing stories. Their ghostly abstracted surfaces play with ideas of visibility and invisibility. While Hartshorn acknowledges the many benefits of the Snowy Hydro—“I wouldn’t give up the luxury of electricity,” he says—he believes that unacknowledged histories need to be foregrounded. “It’s not just the rivers that need protecting, it’s also the stories.”

Across the gallery from Hartshorn’s shields, another artwork transports viewers from Australia to the streets of Ankawa, Iraq, where artist Sarah Ujmaia’s parents once lived. Visitors are invited to walk across thousands of pavers which Ujmaia painstakingly cast by hand. Made from shell grit, their gentle jangle is reminiscent of the sounds of Iraq’s markets.  

Ujmaia’s choice of a material that takes thousands of years to form mirrors the slow transformation of oral languages across generations. For those who walk across the floor, their shoes will pick up the chalk of the pavers and carry traces through the rest of the exhibition and beyond, transferring pieces of the artwork in a kind of material symbolism of how culture and language spreads and morphs.  

The piece is beautifully titled And thank you to my baba for laying the timber floor (2024), and grew from the artist’s appreciation of her father, who left his PhD in Physics to work as a labourer to provide for his family after immigrating to Australia.

Appreciation runs deep throughout the exhibition. “I appreciate the way that the artists’ inquiries and processes have very real implications for them, often strengthening their connections to, and within, their families and communities,” says Latella.  

Monica Rani Rudhar’s film We Were Connected in a More Complicated Way Than Either of Us Could Even Begin to Understand (2023) and larger-than-life sculptural earrings, for example, relied on oral storytelling from various members of her Romanian and Indian families and for her parents to act as interpreters. Through the process of archiving her family’s stories, she grew closer to various members from whom she’d felt a distance due to language barriers.

Likewise, Chun Yin Rainbow Chan’s Long Distance Call 長途電話 (2024) touches on communication barriers as a result of growing up in Australia and how overhearing international telephone conversations between her mother and late aunt gave her a glimpse into the Weitou language and culture of her family in Hong Kong.

As well as appreciation, there is an undercurrent of love that weaves through the artworks—love for places, for people, for objects, for languages, for losses and for family. How does love shape our identities and our culture across time and countries? This is the question that the exhibition ask us to contemplate with each encounter.

In a society that is often dominated by stories of division fuelled by cultural differences, it is refreshing and hopeful to see a young generation of artists navigating their sense of cultural disconnection in complex, thoughtful and layered ways. It is presented not as something nasty or scary, but something with the potential to be full of joy, learning and connection.

Lara Chapman, Warrang/Sydney

Curated by Lucy Latella, ‘Primavera: Young Australian Artists’ continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia until 27 January 2025.