For this exhibitiion Anna Boghiguian’s The Uprooted is presented across Galleries 1 and 2. Commissioned for the 2020 Sydney Biennale and made during her residency at Monash University, this installation draws parallels between the artist’s Armenian ancestry and the Australian context. She has said:
My work centres around the ways in which humans are uprooted from their lands due to social, political and cultural pressures and change from outside. These people have lived on their lands for generations, connected to their unique cultures and ways. These involve religion or beliefs, languages, ways of relating to place, and myths revolving around their existence. Once a population is uprooted, so too are their languages and histories rendered irrelevant, their beliefs no longer tethered to the homes and temples in which they grew.
Anna Boghiguian was born in 1946 in Cairo, Egypt to an Armenian family. She continues to live and work there. A close observer of the human condition, she draws equally on the past and present, poetry and politics, joyfulness and a critique of the contemporary world. In recent years her work has been the subject of surveys at the Castello di Rivoli, Italy (2017), Tate St Ives, UK (2019) and SMAK, Belgium (2020).
Image: The Uprooted, 2020, mixed-media installation. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with assistance from the Council for Australia-Arab Relations of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Supported by Monash Architecture, Design and Art, Monash University, Melbourne.
