TITLE
YEAR
LOCATION
MEDIUM
TYPE
My Body Is The Meeting Place
2022
Brisbane, Australia
Photography, adapted Kāḡaḏ-e Abrī (Abrī) on silk
Publication, Abrī Wearable Art
My Body Is The Meeting Place
2022
Our ancestors and kin,
once displaced and erased,
will forever rise through our eyes, hair, skin, and face.
We’re the vessels, the healers
reconnecting spirit to land and space.
Our bodies are the home for their resting place.
"I always wanted to blend in. To fit in. I didn’t want to be the reason for division. Conversations about culture and religion made me feel caught out, different. There’s a softness to that question now, regardless of how it's asked.
There are so many moments where I have freed myself from this need to shrink as to not poke a certain fragility, and in these moments I have been met with unspoken pushback. Some people don’t like to be challenged or confronted with truths that shatter their own. With truths that threaten their comfortable positions. With truths that shake up exisiting systems that have always benefited them. And these conversations and situations are not limited to specific genders. International Women’s Day always comes and goes, and while we know days like this are often glorified marketing tools, I and many like me hope to use the opportunity to remind you to avoid selectivity when it comes to equality and empowerment of women. I am lucky enough to have felt the raw and core of what this day attempts to represent every day of my life. And this is not thanks to corporations or organisations or advertisement, or any version of feminism that has emerged. It is the women in my life and along the lifeline and timeline of my heritage that have instilled this in me. Specifically my sito and mama. So when I hear people speak of the sisterhood on International Women’s Day, I hope they don’t limit it to their own ideas of sisterhood. Their own ideas of womanhood. Their own ideas of freedom. Because in doing so, the inequalities and barriers and gaps that already exist, will only become more hazardous for those forgotten on the edges of these conversations."
Rose Richani
(Syrian woman with ancestrial roots in Lebanon and Palestine)
"Migration is difficult on my heart. It’s challenging to exist between places/spaces and equally difficult to be settled and always looking back. As a migrant, we often have to carry ‘home’ in our hearts - add a new memory yet holding on to all the past ones. I have been existing in this limbo, in a space that is the 'In-Between' and it has taken an emotional toll on me. Between my memories of home, my yearning for the familiar, for family, for connection and community alongside rebuilding my sense of home, welcoming opportunities and the busyness of work and life in Australia. Is this the way it’s always going to be? Will I always be pulled or is the balance and belonging I seek possible? I feel liberated in the recognition that I, myself, will need to lay the paths before me that may not yet exist. A bridge between the two worlds so that I can transverse, gather, rest, heal, reconnect in whatever way that best suits me.
I find myself making a promise. A determination to not let the busyness of this new life steer me away from maintaining the most important relationship in my heart, the one with my homelands, the one with India. In many ways, this path has brought me full circle. To my beloved appa, whose encouragement to be curious and explore, brought me to Australia and is helping me build the bridge to continue returning home."
Shivani Kanodia
(Marwari woman of the Rajasthan region, India)
"It’s difficult to articulate the experience of feeling that something is amiss. A sudden or ongoing surge of discomfort. You first feel it in your body - your chest, throat, and heart. It then travels up into your mind, suddenly shifting how safe you feel in the world and how connected you feel to yourself and others. Eventually, a constant uneasiness and sensitivity that continually sits with you about where you belong. This was the beginning. Discomfort a trigger that has led me to where I am today. On a journey to begin observing myself from a place of truth, in the world as I am, a woman of richness, diversity and culture.
I have had to process and feel through much sadness and grief for the things about my culture that I didn’t grow up understanding and exploring. This loss of knowledge effected my ability to express and translate my feelings of displacement, of living in a state of limbo - between how I was viewed at home vs in school. But as my siblings and I get older, we talk more to each other about our upbringing, and how this sense of cultural loss and living in-between communities has impacted our relationships with others. My growing sense of loneliness alongside my siblings spurred the interest to ask my parents more questions about their upbringing and culture. Acknowledging this sense of loss has made me more curious and confident to open-up and ask my parents questions. This process has grown my awareness and empathy of their journeys of hardships, and why it all unfolded the way it did."
Shirin Mirshafiei
(Zoroastrian Iranian and Parsi Indian ancestry)
"My culture, was and still is, taken and scattered across several places in a manner so rife with colonial impacts, that the true extent of suffering can never really be measured. Stories forgotten. Memories stolen. With generations of Indian indentured labourers working the lands of South Africa, undergoing immense traumas and forcibly straying further and further from our culture. My people have lost many parts of our culture connected to the ancestral relationships to land and country. And this displacement has caused a misplaced sense of belonging.
Then once more, upon migration to Australia my family and I moved even further from that coveted feeling of belonging. Whilst this once brought me great sadness, it now brings me serene amounts of liberation. My ancestors were warriors who fought to simply free our bodies from slavery. I understand now that it is within my power and my own right to also free my mind. I chose how I belong, not only for myself, but for those that came before me and for those who will come after. Acknowledging what you have lost is important but looking to what you have gained is even more so. "
Kemesha Govender
(Tamil woman of South African Indian ancestry)
A photo series collaboration which documents the personal experiences of women journeying through the In-Between; between identities, cultures and landscapes in Australia and their ancestral homelands. This work shares the lived experiences of identity and belonging by women from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, India, Lebanon, and South Africa.