I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2, Sydney (Exhibition)

International Curators Forum and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in partnership with Campbelltown Arts Centre present ‘I am a heart beating in the world: Diaspora Pavilion 2, Sydney’ – an exhibition which considers the navigations, imaginings and lived experiences of six artists based in Australia, the UK and the Caribbean: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Kashif Nadim Chaudry, Lindy Lee, Leyla Stevens, Zadie Xa and Daniela Yohannes.

Curated by Adelaide Bannerman, Mikala Tai and Jessica Taylor, the exhibition will take place on the land of the Dharawal people at Campbelltown Arts Centre in Western Sydney, Australia.

‘I am a heart beating in the world’ is the first of a series of peripatetic, international events set to take place in Sydney, London, Venice and online culminating in the International Curators Forum’s Diaspora Pavilion 2 project, presented in collaboration with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Diaspora Pavilion 2 interrogates and complicates the term diaspora across various curatorial formats as part of an ongoing mapping of the rich and complex material cultures, mythologies, alternative histories and re-imagined landscapes that are born from the distinct and yet shared reality of belonging to a diaspora.

‘I am a heart beating in the world’ considers how the artists connections to ancestral homes are maintained and re-imagined through memories, myths and traditions. In the exhibition Lindy Lee explores the feelings of absence in the diaspora in the works Fire in the Immanence of Unfolding (2020), Fire and Dew (2020), and Quiescent Mind (2020), and engages family photographs in Birth and Death (2002) and Twinning through jade bamboo (2015). Daniela Yohannes also incorporates family photos into her collages, a series of self-truths (2018), and offers a meditation on our relationships to ‘homelands’ in the film Atopias: I Have Left that Dark Cave Forever, My Body has Blended with Hers (2020). Leyla Stevens’ photographic diptych, Safe Passage (2013) and film, Our Sea is Always Hungry (2018) interrogate what is seen and unseen in the Balinese landscape.

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah exhibits two new sculptures, Buraq (2020) and Throne Room (2021), alongside Merantau (2016), all of which connect in different ways to his ancestry in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Kashif Nadim Chaudry presents two sculptures, Hareem (2010) and Cabal (2020), which consider the cultural and social forces that inform his experiences as a gay man of Pakistani heritage in the UK. Zadie Xa’s large tapestry works A Pilgrimage 2 Family Through the Portal of a Green Ghost and its counterpart A Pilgrimage 2 Family Through the Portal of a Blue Ghost (2019) and film installation Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation (2019) imagine new worlds informed by Korean creation myths.

Understanding diaspora as a distinct, sometimes provisional experience nuanced economically, historically and regionally ‘I am a heart beating in the world’ is as much an exhibition as it is a research project, underpinned by fieldwork and reviews of how artists, curators, theorists and institutions engage with diaspora as a topic. 4A’s biannual 4A Curators Intensive will be held alongside the exhibition, bringing together early-career Australian and UK-based curators in a week-long professional development programme. The intensive will be facilitated in a hybrid format through workshops, lectures, site visits and discussions.