GALLERY ONE
Anau
Ayah Zakout
Anau is a response to the immense weight that comes with carrying on tradition in the position of a compromised identity.
When your koro gets diagnosed with dementia and his Indigenous Kūki ‘Airani Māori body becomes property of the New Zealand government. When money is the only thing that will grant him his autonomy and right to rest with family. When the country keeps taking charge of the bodies we birth.
Then you're twenty-something, in the land of your ancestors, your mother tells of her grievances and anger: the disputes going on between her siblings, the heritage home that is so corrupted it has to be torn limb from limb, the money spent on substances, the 20th century divorce, the feijoas that grow in the backyard, the pet pig she owned as a child, the route she took to school and the bull that chased her home one day.
I was born part of her flesh, I think she has always realised that. Anau.
Ayah Zakout is a Naarm-based visual artist of Palestinian and Polynesian descent (Kūki ‘Airani Māori and Tahitian Mā'ohi), currently situated and practicing on Bunurong/Boonwurrung land.
As a multidisciplinary artist, Ayah ventures both traditional and digital mediums, occasionally combining her ways of working. With a keen focus on text and cross-translation, she pursues a range of subject matters; primarily that of cultural importance and sentiment, to linguistic questioning and reflection regarding their political identity.
Currently prioritising confessional writing, textile work and archive, Ayah desires to depict what entire self-expression truly entails.
GALLERY TWO
Affiliation Ritual
Ebony Maurice-Wilmott
What is lost and gained in the liminal space between material transfers and auratic traces?
Affiliation Ritual is a 16mm film which dialectically engages with the nature of film practice through its aesthetic economy of production. The film is an outcome of process-based research which uses anthropologist Tim Ingold’s methodology of ‘haptic making’ to archive a series of frottaged ironing boards.
Ingold suggests materials are alchemical and should be treated as though they are in a state of flux. Frottage’s material conversion into a filmic mode muddies notions of ocular-centricity through its privileging of haptic images, a world felt through touch. Extending upon the work of practitioners interested in the structures of cinema and theatre such as Bertolt Brecht, Peter Cripps, and Lars Von Trier, the cinema is conceptualised as a mode of both display and archive, the film as a work in progress presents a space of encounter and ambiguity.
Ebony Maurice-Wilmott is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist whose work uses the formal language of abstraction to investigate distinctions between the hand-made and manufactured objects. With a focus on the act of making according to pre-determined rules, she uses both industrial and domestic found materials. Her research currently investigates how systematic repetition can create space for viewer contemplation, and how meaning can be shaped by the way in which an artwork is presented. Selected exhibitions include Hatched, 2025 (PICA, Perth), Phenomenal Matter, 2025 (Mary Cherry Contemporary, Melbourne), Opening Night/ Birthday Party, 2024 (St. Kilda residence, Melbourne), Angel Place, 2023 (CBD Gallery, Sydney), and Axis and Origin, 2023 (Carpark Gallery, Brisbane).
GALLERY THREE
Untitled
Fred Bulbeck
As part of STRAY VOLTAGE, my work aims to create an atmosphere of tension and ambiguity using readymade 3D avatars, sound design and photogrammetry. Guiding this atmosphere are small vignettes where all the characters interact with each other using their “gaze”. Specifically, the brief moments between the characters are reminiscent of awkward interactions and judgmental looks all emphasised by the fractured spaces of 3D scanned rooms and unusual sounds from synthesizers.
Fred Bulbeck is an artist whose work is about the remixing and recontextualising of objects, figures and sounds through different materials and programs. Fred blurs the lines between maturity and juvenility to create ambiguity and uneasiness. Exploring the idea of human interaction and digital nausea through his animations of digital actors called “Metahumans”, Fred restricts their high-end capabilities of these readymade avatars by manually keyframing their movements as they interact with one another.These interactions are in the environment of distorted 3D scans of rooms in which photogrammetry renders images and wraps them into a 3D Mesh. Fred’s work ultimately contemplates and mirrors the growing state of technology and our response to its incline.
OPENING CELEBRATIONS
Thursday 11th September,
6 – 8pm
EXHIBITION RUNS
11th September - 5th October
ONLINE SHOP STILL OPEN
KINGS 22nd birthday fundraiser party
The KINGS Fundraiser shop will be open for the remainder of the week (and partly into next week as the artists slowly pick up their works)
In an economy of increasing rent and operational costs, alongside the precarity of our arts funding, every purchase (whether big or small!) helps keep our doors open and exhibitions free for artists. Please consider supporting us to keep doing the work that we do
5% of our fundraiser profits will also be donated to Palestine Australia Relief and Action, and Pay the Rent.
To make a donation or purchase an artwork you can view our online shop HERE