Mutual Feelings is Isabella Catanaro’s event production which brough together six local and international artists to explore personal journeys of suffering and the collectivisation of modes of resistance. We are wounded individually; collectively, we bear suffering.

The artists – six women and gender diverse people:

Ruaa Al-Rikabi

Zara Dudley

Lucy Nguyễn-Hunt

Kylie Spear

Eye Suriyanon

Kayla Tange

The artworks invited the audience to peek into the lives of the artists and the exhibition evoked a sense of public intimacy. I talked to Ruaa, Lucy, Kylie, and Zara (the Meanjin-based artists) about the meaning and message of their art and they brought me into their stories to show me a piece of themselves through their art.

I had the pleasure to hear about the journey of Lucy and Ruaa’s mothers as migrants to Australia. Every story of migration is unique, but they all resonate with a similar vibrancy, especially in the ears of a migrant herself. One of Ruaa’s artworks was a collage of her mom’s photos and her letters to her beloved sent while travelling. The old photos and the Arabic calligraphy created a strong sense of memory. One of Lucy’s artworks was a series of photos representing her mom. One of these was digitally manipulated and unexpectedly introduced Lucy next to her young mother. The juxtaposition of Lucy and her young mother was powerful in the ways that it collapsed time and two lives that are culturally distant yet deeply and physically connected. It was inspiring to see the gratitude and respect of Lucy and Ruaa towards their mothers and to witness these young women’s awareness of the challenges of mothering, especially those peculiar to migrant women.

Through the work of Kylie Spear, the audience was presented with a different perspective on mothering and family. Kylie is the mother of a beautiful young girl and explored the theme of family connection at a time when the pandemic keeps us apart. Kylie’s work was a video projection of patterns in soft colours. The perfect 22nd century house decoration, maybe the reinvention of wallpaper in the age of hyper-technology. While the visuals recalled the interior design of a 1950s suburban house inhabited by a raising middle-class American family, the metallic sound that accompanied it disturbed the idyll and anchored me back in the present. The cacophony and the dreamy visuals created an effective push and pull from dream to reality and vice-versa. Kyle produced Interior in 2020 to honour her family which has been kept apart by the global Covid pandemic. She sourced the colours appearing in the visual projection from her home and the houses of her family members. Interior is the token of a new family model: powered by digital technologies.   

Kylie Spear - Stills from Interior

Zara’s piece invited contemplation of the relation between romantic love and violence. A wedding dress rolled up and pressed by a lifeless and heavy brick was lying next to small white swords, axes, and daggers. The weapons of war and violence. Zara positioned every object of her installation with precision. Alignment, direction, and a few knots suggest that those objects are the leftover of a ritual. Zara confessed an infatuation for romantic love and that Matrimony was her way to come to terms with it, a practice to recalibrate and find a new balance. She looks young and already burnt by the modern construct of love, the indomitable feeling of longing for the other half of our avocado that will complete us. We fight for it, but we suffer when we have it.

The exhibition also spoke of the dislocated identity of people who sit on the hyphen: Ruaa is Iraqi-Syrian-Australian; Lucy is Vietnamese and Samoan/Cook Islander Australian; Kayla Tange is Korean and was adopted by a Japanese American family; Eye Suriyanon, born in Thailand, is now living in the UK. How do you make sense of yourself when a world of national citizenship and borders cannot make sense of you? In search of an answer, we ride the waves of isolation, yearn for connection, objectification, abjection, exoticisation, refusal, and , if we are lucky, self-love. Sometimes these waves are far apart and leave us steep in the waters of our own self-generated feelings amplified by loneliness. Some other times, they play tag, and mesh and merge without prior consent. Kayla unravels the complicated feelings of an adopted child looking for her own identity in a world that eroticise and exoticize the figure of the Asian woman. In an artistic video, she wears a traditional Korean gown worn by the royal women of the Goryeo and Joseon Dynasty for ceremonial occasions. This dress was a collaboration between Kayla herself and Cypress Corsetry. The use of non-traditional colors in the robe and shibari rope for the undergarment frame this very personal narrative of being a South Korean orphan adopted by a Japanese American family and the historical conflict between the two cultures. It also calls attention to the fetishization of Asian women and how the art of burlesque has been a healing catalyst for her acceptance of her origin.

Ruaa embarked on a journey of self-acceptance and self-love with a piece featuring her curly, dark, and unruly hair trapped in disks of resin. She confessed to have a complicated relation with her hair because it does not conform to the standards of feminine beauty. This piece helped her come to terms and finally accept what she called “the undesirable features of my self-identity.” 

Self-acceptance and the difficult relationship that we have with ourselves and with others because of our identity are also the themes of Lucy’s second artwork, When you deny me my liberation I have no choice but to set myself free. This is a powerful and witty artwork that expressed a yearning for authenticity and a desire to stop being someone we are not. This is a poem printed red on red, only a few words are readable. The last line of the poem is the most readable, “In an effort to reach for sanity.” The audience dances back and forth looking for the words that can reveal Lucy’s story. This artwork is about Lucy’s experience of coming out as queer to her mother.

In organising Mutual Feelings, Isabella, a non-binary emerging artist and curator in Meanjin, showed great sensibility towards the human experience, awareness of diversity of being and expression, and impressive organisational skills. House Conspiracy is also pleased that Mutual Feelings offered the opportunity to the Meanjin artists to re-emerge from the sleepiness of the pandemic and to the international artists to forge new connections overseas.