Sha Sarwari, Liminal برزخ (Detail), 2023. Photo: Louis Lim. Courtesy: the artist and Redland Art Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane.

Sha Sarwari’s work responds to both the experience and representation of refugees in Australia. Language is a crucial force here and is the raw material for the creation of works that use newspaper clippings, postcards, and charcoal renderings of Nastiliq calligraphy to express Sarwari’s journey as a refugee from Afghanistan: a life between two worlds. This is a ‘liminal’ existence, where one is simultaneously on both sides of a threshold, where the transitional becomes continual.

The title of the exhibition pairs ‘liminal’ with the Farsi term, “برزخ”, or Barzakh, which similarly refers to the experience of being in limbo. The exhibition, Liminal برزخ, extends the meeting of languages, and these concepts to understand refugee experience as one between pasts and futures, alienation and acceptance, remembrance and forgetting.

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