The Night of Counting the Tears 28 April-15 July 2023 @islamicmuseumaustralia @ishak_raafat
The Night of Counting the Tears brings together the contemporary works of two Melbourne-based artists with Egyptian heritage, Raafat Ishak and Ezz Monem. Their works reflect on the journey and experience of migration from Egypt to Australia, meditating on the intersection between the contemporary and the archive. The exhibition features a range of media, including prints, paintings, videos and sound works that reflect on the archive to recover lost memories. Raafat Ishak's portrait paintings are derived from five passport size photographs which friends gave him in 1982 as he was departing Cairo airport to migrate to Australia. The paintings were embellished with five dormitory buildings at Trinity College Melbourne, which Raafat repurposes as the regal domains of his lost friends. Raafat's works also include a ruptured black box, a sound work and a 90 minute film, exploring multiple connections and traditions. Ezz Monem's work is part of a larger project using the artist's first name 'Mohamed' as a starting point for his research. The project explores the tension between reverence and the profane by creating a manifold portrait of Mohamed appropriated from Egyptian and broader Middle Eastern cinema, collected, viewed, archived and manipulated, both digitally and manually, to highlight the ghostly boundaries of representation.
Works in the exhibition are courtesy of the artists, Sutton Gallery Melbourne and THIS IS NO FANTASY Gallery.
@thisisnofantasy @suttongallerymelbourne
