Casula Powerhouse exhibition showcases refugee artists

A provocative new exhibition will spotlight the contribution made by leading artists with a refugee background

Anne Zahalka is a leading Sydney photographer. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Almost every day of the 1989 Beijing pro-democracy protest by students, Ah Xian rode his bicycle to Tiananmen Square.

Ah Xian was a freelance artist and not a student. But he had friends who were occupying the square as part of the protest, and he wanted to see what was going on.

On June 4, Ah Xian was standing on stately Chang’an Ave near the square when China turned its army on its own people.

Footage of a lone man, clutching a shopping bag as he blocked the path of an approaching army tank, flashed around the world and became the defining image of the Tiananmen Square massacre of student protesters.

“I witnessed all what happened,” Ah Xian says.

Artist Ah Xian came to Australia after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Photo: Bob Barker.

“I stayed at the heavy fighting spot along the Chang’an Ave. Many, many tanks. Next morning it’s just like after war, like war in Iraq or something. Along the Chang’an Ave there were many buses, trucks and tanks burning. Thick black smoke and fire. It was a big mess.”

Ah Xian cycled to nearby Fuxing Hospital, and witnessed about 20 bodies inside a bicycle shed on the hospital premises.

“I guessed it must be full inside (the hospital), otherwise they won’t lay them outside,” Ah Xian says.

He applied for asylum in Australia after participating in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1990. He argued that as an artist he was denied freedom of expression in a totalitarian regime.

Five years after he applied, he was granted permanent residency.

Ah Xian is now a respected Sydney artist who lives on the north shore and exhibits his work in New York, Berlin, London and Japan.

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In 2008, one of his works was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Titled China China — Bust 81, it’s a white porcelain bust overlaid with a traditional Chinese landscape painting. It will be shown among 76 works by 22 artists in a boldly political exhibition called Refugees, which opens at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre on July 29.

Five living Australian artists are in the exhibition, while the international artists include historical figures such as Marc Chagall.

Contemporary stars including Frank Auerbach and Christian Boltanski are in it. The late Lucian Freud is also represented.

Ah Xian will undertake his first-ever art performance at the exhibition’s opening event, where he will take on the
guise of one of his own porcelain busts.

A work by Aida Tomescu from the exhibition

A special plinth is being made to give the impression Ah Xian’s upper body is sitting inside a display case. He will sit motionless, and with eyes closed, for three hours.

Although this work could be read as a silent protest, Ah Xian’s artworks are not necessarily informed by his refugee experience, and the exhibition works were not selected on that basis, curator Toni Bailey says.

Painting by Danila Vassileff

The exhibition is more to show what a great contribution leading artists have made when offered asylum from “harrowing” situations, Bailey says.

“Hopefully it’s a way of making a positive statement and addressing some of those misconceptions,” she says.

“To know of these artists and to hear of the terrible danger they have been in, it just makes it about humans. It reminds us to have a heart.”

Bailey says public events and workshops will accompany the exhibition. And a national symposium at the Powerhouse on August 19-20 will bring together arts organisations that work with refugees — an Australian first, Bailey says.

Newtown artist Anne Zahalka will show her photographic series Threshold in the exhibition and is right behind Ms Bailey’s mission.

“I find it appalling that we aren’t able to treat asylum seekers humanely and to assist them in what are perilous times. To incarcerate them is just so inhumane,” Zahalka says.

Refugee artists exhibition at the Casula Powehouse museum. A work by Anne Zahalka.

“Just trying to deter them by setting up these kind of prisons just seems completely in opposition to an Australian ethic.”

The images in Threshold were shot in Morocco and show hooded figures disappearing down alleyways in the kasbah. For Zahalka, they represent the fear of being a stranger.

Many of Zahalka’s past art works have spoken directly to her family’s roots in the bloody soil of World War II Europe.

Zahalka’s mother Hedy was born to a wealthy family in Vienna. When the Nazis began their oppression of the Jews, Hedy was sent on a “kindertransport” to England, where she married a Czech who had fought with the Allies. The couple migrated to Australia in 1950.

Artist Anne Zahalka’s grandmother Margarethe Back who died in Auschwitz.

When Hedy died this year, Zahalka acquired boxes of her family’s diaries, letters and postcards. They date from the 1930s and ’40s, and her task now is to have them translated.

One of the objects is a cookbook, given to Hedy by her own mother, Margarethe, when Hedy left Vienna. Unbeknown to them, they would never meet again. Margarethe, a single woman at that stage, was sent to a Jewish ghetto and on to Auschwitz where she perished.

“Amazingly, my mother heard (Magarethe) had met someone in the ghetto in Poland and married,” Zahalka says.

“So I’m very curious to see if any of these letters were written from the ghetto to just confirm that.”