The Like Button, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 2018 – 2019, installation view. Photo: Luis Power. Courtesy: the artist, Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney, and Murray Art Museum Albury.

Titled Esperanto, this exhibition by Newell Harry marks the first time the gallery has presented a major solo exhibition of works by a contemporary Australian artist. Harry is an Australian born artist of South African and Mauritian descent who draws from an intimate web of connections across Oceania and the wider Indo-Pacific, to South Africa’s Western Cape Province where his extended family continue to reside.

Influenced by almost two decades of travel between Australia, South Africa, the islands of Vanuatu and the wider Asia-Pacific region, Harry’s work examines the cultural agitation brought about by the movement of people, objects and knowledge as a result of colonial expansion, migration and globalisation.

Through an ongoing syncretic process of collecting, trading and documenting, Harry has amassed a wealth of objects, artefacts, photographs and stories that speak to themes of exchange, value and currency, as well as the entanglements of race, language, material culture and the associated complexities of identity, movement and dislocation in the region.

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