Event details
‘Familial’ brings together 6 artists from around the world whose work traces the emotional and psychological terrain of family – of bonds and ruptures, tenderness, memory and the ache of absence.
Presented by the Centre for Contemporary Photography, the exhibition reflects on the complexities of connection in a meditation on love, longing and the enduring imprints our closest relationships leave behind.
Navigating the experience of distance, dislocation and ongoing uncertainty, Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji documented two years of WhatsApp calls with his mother in Gaza; each communication shaped and destabilised by conflict.
Argentinian artist Mariela Sancari’s typology of portraits depicts 70-year-old men dressed in her late father’s clothes, revealing the deeply personal journey of processing grief for a parent who is no longer present.
Charting motherhood and identity, Australian photographer EJ Hassan (1982–2024) photographed her twin boys every day; tenderness and poetry shines through in each personal and diaristic image. Similarly candid and often humorous, Annie Wang’s annual mother-son portraits record 22 years of time passing and inter-generational bonds shifting within a traditional Taiwanese context.
The healing potential of photography is evident in Malay-Australian artist Nur Aishah Kenton’s images, where the camera is used to reconnect with her mother and propose their sharing of the weight of generational cycles of loss and trauma. Similarly cathartic in process, Australian artist Abigail Varney layers archival images, family photographs and her own work to construct a vivid, celebratory portrait of her late mother.
Accessible in approach, ‘Familial’ reveals sons and daughters photographing parents, and parents photographing children – sometimes slowly over decades, sometimes with urgency. To photograph another person is to know them differently, to see them afresh; and to see the images made by a parent or an offspring is to see the world anew, through their eyes.
Featuring: Taysir Batniji, EJ Hassan, Nur Aishah Kenton, Mariela Sancari, Abigail Varney and Annie Wang.
Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) is supported by Spicers Australia, Hahnemuhle, HCPro, Colour Factory and Final Grade.
Image: Detail from Nur Aishah Kenton, ‘'Aishah!' Self-portrait with my mother. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Centre for Contemporary Photography.
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