Artist, writer, and IMA Visiting Curator Léuli Eshrāghi—currently working on our upcoming exhibition The Commute—will present a new performance work, Paper/s/kin Gesture, for First Thursdays. Eshrāghi developed this work for the Bloodlines, an exhibition by artist and IMA Curator of Public Engagement Sancintya Simpson at MetroArts. The exhibition considers how memory moves through generations, with specific relation to the untold experiences of women taken as indentured labourers from India to South Africa. Seeking to create a space of wellness within an exhibition that addresses shared and personal traumas, Eshrāghi will host a ceremony as a gesture of solidarity and collective healing. It will involve sacred medicines, including charcoal and waters from across cultures (including turmeric, rose, lemongrass, and coconut). The artist invites you into a transformative space for healing and wellness, to breathe, contemplate, and share sacred waters with community members effected by intergenerational traumas.
-
Léuli Māzyār Lunaʻi Eshrāghi is an artist, curator, and writer visiting Kulin Nation territory who hails from the Sāmoan archipelago, Pārs plateau, and other ancestries. The artist’s work centres on ceremonial-political practices, language renewal, and Indigenous futures throughout the Great Ocean. Across video, photography, painting, and installation, Eshrāghi processes intergenerational trauma, honours diasporic indigeneity, and imagines multilingual sovereign bodies and relationships to our planet.
