You’re Welcome?!
Verge Gallery
2025
What does it mean to feel welcome in a land that is built on contradictions? You’re Welcome? is an exhibition that brings together a group of early career and emerging Sydney-based artists who, through their diverse practices, challenge the concept of belonging in contemporary Australia. Each artist grapples with identity, community, and resistance, creating both physical and digital spaces wh`ere their voices are amplified, despite an often hostile and unwelcoming Australian cultural consciousness.
As an Aboriginal artist of Dharug descent, I have long found myself questioning the notion of being "welcome" in Australia. Growing up in a country where every formal event begins with an official Welcome to Country, it often feels like my people are asked to welcome others to a land that has been taken and denied to us for over two hundred years. Through my work, I explore the complexities of this contradiction. My practice—spanning ceramic sculpture, painting, printmaking and installation—challenges and subverts the colonial narratives that continue to shape Australian identity. Through humour and subversion, I attempt to create new narratives that honour my heritage while interrogating what it means to be an Indigenous person living in urban Australia today.
In You’re Welcome?, Gomeroi artist Gosha Heldtz’ large-scale works, infused with pop culture references and “Australian” motifs, deconstruct the nationalistic culture that continues to impact Indigenous bodies. Heldtz’s paintings deface found objects, including political signage, as a form of hijack against colonial and political social narratives. Having relocated from regional North-West NSW to Sydney in 2021 to study, the work that Heldtz now creates is an unadulterated, raw and direct account of the space she currently occupies.
Jacquie Meng’s paintings, with their fluid and speculative approach to identity, offer a unique lens on diasporic experience. Meng allows the viewer to engage with identity as an ever-evolving, unfixed concept. Her works reflect on the migration of culture and identity across boundaries—both geographical and social—and invite us to reflect on the strangeness of the world we navigate, indulging in the complexities of belonging in an increasingly globalized world. Meng’s commissioned installation acts as a road map for navigating her self-identity, combining mosaics, drawings and murals to create a dreamscape that traverses across the gallery walls.
Serwah Attafuah’s surreal, Afro-futuristic portraits offer a compelling examination of identity, empowerment, and self-representation. Her innovative use of 3D digital techniques creates otherworldly environments where self and identity are abstracted and transformed. Her work transcends physical dimensions, existing in a post-internet framework that explores her Ghanian heritage, her Western Sydney community and the many subcultures she exists within. Attafuah’s Future Relics in You’re Welcome? blend old world aesthetics with futuristic technologies and narratives to represent an unwavering intergenerational fight against colonial oppression.
Heath Nock’s commissioned painting Last of the Showies explores his relationship with being raised in a family of travelling Romani showmen. Some of his earliest memories of making art were helping his grandpa and father paint tin enamel rides and game signs for their family’s circus amusements. Nock’s self-portrait grapples with his experiences travelling regionally as a young boy in Australia, bringing fun and entertainment to communities, yet still being seen as an outsider. Hiding behind a clown amusement, Nock’s forlorn gaze hints at the sombre nature of a life spent in transience, performing for the crowds before moving on to the next town. He likens himself to the Yeti, something different that is always on the move. Included in Nock’s installation is two of his grandfather’s amusement paintings.
As a Kurdish refugee who spent nearly 8 years in detention on Manus Island and within a Melbourne apartment complex, Mostafa ‘Moz’ Azimitabar’s practice speaks to the strength, resilience, and humanity of those who have been dehumanized by the Australian immigration system. Through his use of unconventional painting materials like toothbrushes and coffee—items he used in detention due to restrictions on art supplies—Azimitabar’s art expresses his struggle, his endurance, and his unyielding hope for love and unity in the face of systemic oppression. Moz’s landscape paintings represent a world outside the four walls of the imprisonment of his detention, envisioning a dreamlike utopia that took him away from the extreme realities of being held captive within our detention system.
You’re Welcome? is a celebration of diverse voices, unique practices, and the ongoing struggle for a more inclusive and compassionate understanding of identity and belonging. Each artist in this exhibition uses their practice as a tool for resistance—whether through humour, surrealism, or raw vulnerability—offering new ways to imagine what it means to be welcome in a country still grappling with its past and its future. Through these works, we are invited to reflect on the ongoing tensions between our histories and our aspirations, and what it means to truly make space for one another in this complex landscape.
- Billy Bain
