José Da Silva
“rūḥ al-rūḥ – jan-e janān”

In rūḥ al-rūḥ—jan-e janān, sexuality is not just an expression of desire or an identity to be declared. It is an animating essence, a way of sensing, inhabiting and relating to the world and to each other.

The exhibition title borrows the expression جان جان (jan-e janān) from Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rūmī, which describes an innermost essence, or life within life itself. Here, in its union with the Arabic expression روح الروح (rūḥ al-rūḥ, or the soul of my soul), it emphasises how artists Elyas Alavi, Ayman Kaake, Ali Tahayori and Kia Zand embody queerness as both a spiritual and political condition. Together, they search for spiritual, linguistic, and aesthetic vocabularies to express that essence and reimagine queer relationality.

Elyas, Ayman, Ali and Kia are connected through shared cultural and religious lineages that have formed across West and Central Asia, particularly within the social, political and material cultures of Afghanistan, Iran and Lebanon. Their experiences of negotiation and adaptation echo one another, amplified by living and working in diaspora. Like many queer people from Arab, Muslim and South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) communities, they navigate visibility while maintaining familial and cultural ties, often within environments marked by the normalising of homophobia, racism and Islamophobia. Their new commissions for rūḥ al-rūḥ—jan-e janān emerge from this tension, moving between moments of declaration and discretion and asserting the right to decide when and how they are seen.

Queer people of the SWANA region also share histories of repression, in which authorities have treated sexual orientation or gender identity as violations of Islamic morality and social order. Across the region, religious, colonial and nationalist frameworks have criminalised same-sex relations, conflating sexuality with moral corruption.1 The exhibition begins within this atmosphere of violence and from the strategies artists have developed to protect and preserve queer intimacy and kinship.

Elyas has long considered art and poetry as intertwined strategies for expressing how pain and joy can coexist and how acts of remembering can serve as a form of resistance. In دیوار | Divāl, 2025, he creates a space to reflect on the persecution of Afghan people based on their sexual orientation, drawing on accounts of a worsening situation after the Taliban reclaimed control of the country in 2021. “Even if you go to the skies, we’ll find you,” was the horrifying proclamation made by the Taliban, capturing the regime’s obsessive reach and intent to persecute queer communities.

Elyas constructs a seemingly ordinary wall in the gallery using handmade bricks that recall the kučeh (alleyways) of Afghanistan and Iran. On closer inspection, letters and inscriptions painted and etched into the bricks become visible, including the names of young Afghan men reported tortured or killed because of their sexuality. The wall suggests confinement and eyewitness, recalling brutal acts of humiliation and punishment in which victims were forced to stand before a collapsing wall. This imagery also appears in Elyas’s poem دوری / Distance (2012), which speaks from the perspective of a wall that witnesses the final night of a prisoner, listening to their last thoughts and observations.

On the wall’s reverse side, missing bricks create cavities and shelves that hold small objects: a crumpled letter and small photographs that capture moments with friends, some of whose identities remain obscured. Among these tokens are pomegranates, symbols of abundance and fortitude, and salt, which Elyas describes as “tears, purification, and the taste of memory that never leaves.”2 These elements become symbols of queer desire and endurance, where flesh meets spirit and love survives loss. A single blue neon word in Farsi, یاد (yād), signposts the wall as a site of remembrance. Used in various contexts to describe memory or commemoration—as in the expression یادش ماندگار (yādesh māndegār), or “may their memory last”—it becomes a quiet invocation of resilience for all those who remain in Afghanistan.

Kia’s new installation, Only Birds Could See (2025), pursues another way of memorialising queer knowledge and access to it, situating these ideas alongside the symbolism of Sufism, the use of abstraction as a form of resistance, and the complex optics of public monuments. The work is composed of discarded marble offcuts sourced from a factory in Dandenong, arranged in a circular formation in which each slab supports and holds the others. The title draws inspiration from the Sufi allegory of coexistence and shared survival in منطق‌الطیر‎ / Manṭiq al-Ṭayr (The Conference of the Birds) by Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār. The sculpture emits the sound of its own making as the metal rods of programmed stepper motors strike and brush against the marble, simulating the mechanical rhythms of industry.

For Kia, the hexagonal space at the centre of the work is as significant as the solid fragments. It is not a void to be filled or deciphered, but a site of refusal: “By arranging these fragments in a ring, I create a monument that withholds rather than declares. That hollow is not a lack, but a chosen opacity, an insistence that not everything must be extracted, explained, or translated for an outside gaze.”3

Kia embraces ‘opacity’ as a form of dignity and protection—echoing Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s call to respect the right of individuals and cultures to remain partially unknowable to others—to suggest that queer knowledges must remain partially unseen to withstand commodification, surveillance, and enforced legibility. Kia also links this to the path of Sufism, which values an inward search for truth and cultivates understanding through introspection rather than outward display.

For a queer Iranian artist working in Australia, this refusal has a particular charge. It resists both cultural silencing and the demand for visibility that risks turning identity into spectacle. Kia’s approach is an assertion of self-determination and of queer world-making built from fragments and knowledge sustained through codes, vocabularies, and kinship structures. His monument is not one of mourning, but again of endurance. It is a structure sustained through interdependence.

Ayman takes a direct approach to how queer communities from the SWANA region negotiate the privileges and expectations of diasporic life. His new installation, Testing the Water (2025), builds on an earlier project, مسبحة / Misbaḥa (2023), inspired by the prayer beads used to guide tasbih. It depicted Ayman wearing a white abaya and invited audiences to inscribe a single word on its surface in response to the question: “What did you sacrifice or compromise to meet social expectations?” The responses revealed a broad spectrum of concessions from the audience: my mother tongue, softness, comfort, sanity, peace, my voice, quietness, queerness, my roots, marriage, joy, freedom, romanticism, dignity, wine, humility, my soft toys, agency, belonging, submission, silence, war, and outrage.

The inscribed abaya returns in this exhibition, worn by Ayman, whose life-sized image is projected onto layers of chiffon. An accompanying soundtrack features him whispering in Arabic, posing questions that resonate with these concessions: “Tell me about your brain. Did you have to dumb yourself down to meet expectations? Tell me about agency. What did you do to fit into your social and cultural bubble? What did you do to maintain an image, to express yourself, and not bring shame to your family?” Ayman’s questions create a decisive moment of recognition and empathy between artist and audience.

For Ayman, the new work “explores the dual identity one must navigate—when to conceal and when to reveal—amid unwritten societal rules shaped by religion, culture, myth, and politics.”4 Ayman’s own contribution to the abaya was belly dancing, cautiously recreated in the video through the movement of his torso and arms that evoke a sense of the forbidden. As he turns, the motion also recalls a Sufi dervish, a gesture sitting between earth and a search for transcendence. The abaya moves from an emblem of modesty to one of reclamation, allowing the artist to test the limits of visibility, belonging, and transformation.

Ali also connects queer and diasporic subjectivities, emphasising feelings of belonging and displacement that reflect his migrant experience, as well as expressions of desire, longing and intimacy informed by his queerness. He works within the painstaking tradition of āyeneh-kāri, the Persian art of mirror mosaic, assembling finely cut mirrors into geometric designs. This practice, which historically utilised broken mirrors, carries deep associations with sacred architecture, adorning the interiors of mosques and mausoleums. For Ali, the mirror also prompts questions about recognition: who appears, who disappears, and which lives are allowed to be seen. In this way, his work opens a space for reflection on visibility while protecting what must remain opaque.

Ali’s new project connects to an earlier text-based mirror work, There Is No Queer in Iran (2023), whose title comes from a statement made by then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2007, when he declared that Iran did not have “the phenomenon” of homosexuality. Ali was struck not only by the denial itself, but by its suggestion that queerness could be rendered geographically or racially impossible. After finding a Wikipedia entry on the term, which noted that Persian linguists consider there to be no equivalent term in Farsi, Ali transformed that text into a script using Kufic, one of the earliest and most abstract forms of Arabic calligraphy. Ali explains, “I wanted to create a queer code that was nearly illegible and a script that even native readers might not fully decode.”5

In doing so, he sought to create a linguistic resistance to systems of power denying queerness and erasing it from language, geography and history.

While previous works have incorporated both Farsi and English, Ali’s new work, Queers Were Here Before They Arrived (2025), returns to Arabic. Here, the large mirror installation spells out its title: كان المثليون هنا قبل وصولهم. The “they” is intentionally left open; it could mean state powers, organised religion, colonisers, developers or any authority that seeks to deny queer presence or claim ownership over land, culture or history. Suspended from the ceiling, the large structure catches and reflects light in the gallery. The effect is both spectral and devotional, a floating plane that asserts visibility and projects flecks of light onto Elyas’s wall and its acts of remembrance.

In rūḥ al-rūḥ—jan-e janān, each artist negotiates what it means to live between social, cultural and artistic contexts. Their practices have emerged from diasporic and queer experiences, shaped by both the freedoms they claim and the weight of cultural responsibility. Through materials and gestures of exposure and concealment, their works become acts of resistance. Elyas Alavi’s memorial wall, Kia Zand’s silent monument, Ayman Kaake’s questioning voice and Ali Tahayori’s reflective inscription all engage the dynamics of looking and withholding. Together, they recast marginality as a space of insight, where opacity becomes a means of survival. Ultimately, the four artists reveal that queerness is not only about being seen, but also about sustaining one another—protecting what must remain private and finding ways to live truthfully within, and despite, constraint.