“assembly nights”
Cher Tan, Lana Nguyen, Lucy Van, Ender Başkan, Moorina Bonini and Tahmina Maskinyar
2 Sept → 16 Sept 2026
Program
assembly nights are communal gatherings around an activity, intended to extend upon the themes of the exhibition language to reach with.
Hosted at West Space on three Wednesday evenings in September, assembly nights are free to attend, all are welcome.
assembly night with Cher Tan | reading
Wednesday 2 September, 6 → 7.30pm
Hosted by Cher Tan, the first assembly night is focussed on texts that demonstrate the capacity and importance of expression as well as critical responses to Large Language Models like OpenAI.
Bring a favourite poem, essay, or the name of a writer/critic you find interesting. Part show and tell, part let’s gather the words and reference points that help us to attune ourselves to the importance of our own expression.
assembly night with Lana Nguyen, Lucy Van and Ender Başkan | long systematic derangement of the senses
Wednesday 9 September, 6 → 8pm
Join us for a discussion on political and poetic language in the lead up to the Victorian State Election, looking at how language can be used and destroyed in the act of lobbying for electoral power, and whether poetic words can move towards democratic poetic acts.
Through excerpts of texts, poems and political speech, Lana Nguyen, Lucy Van, and Ender Başkan facilitate time thinking about what language reveals of our senses and a mounting far-right swing.
"That a poem may use the same words as a Company Report means no more than the fact that a lighthouse and a prison cell may be built with stones from the same quarry."
assembly night with Moorina Bonini and Tahmina Maskinyar | writing
Wednesday 16 September, 6 → 7:30pm
The final assembly night will encourage a reconnection with our written languages. Bring your preferred writing tools and be guided through three short writing exercises facilitated Moorina Bonini and Tahmina Maskinyar.
This is for anyone interested in putting your personal words to places, land or Country you are connected with. There will be no expectation to share writing, the gathering is a passage to return to our capacity to write the language we know.
"Language is the foundation upon which a cultural revival can be built, not just something that describes or gives information.
Language encodes meanings and perceptions of the universe; bi- and multi-lingual readers of this piece will know that each language brings with it a unique set of perceptions and understandings of the individual's relationship within the greater society."
— Lin Onus, Language and Lasers in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians.
Cher Tan is an essayist, editor and critic. Her critically acclaimed essay collection, Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging, was published by NewSouth in May 2024. She lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri country.
Lana Nguyen is an independent curator, writer and researcher with a particular focus on projects that stem from and interact with the politics and cultures of place. Interested in experimental, live and public art, she has worked across the small to medium contemporary arts sector, recently focusing on creating spaces for collective learning and practice, site responsive cultural production and initiatives for climate response. She founded A Climate For Art and works with Creative Climate to support centring climate in the arts sector. Nguyen is the Greens candidate for Niddrie in the upcoming 2026 Victorian election.
Lucy Van writes poetry and criticism. She has published Figures (Purely Physical 2017; Boomkat 2022), The Open (Cordite 2021), Australian Women Photographers: Other Times, Other Views (Anthem 2024) and MATERIAL (Permanent Draft 2026).
Ender Başkan is a Melbourne-based poet, novelist, small-press publisher and bookseller. The winner of the 2021 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, his poems have been published in HEAT, Meanjin, Cordite, Unusual Work and Best of Australian Poems. He has also published a novel, A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man. He is the co-founder of Vre Books press, Agog poetry readings and Study experimental space.
Moorina Bonini is a proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta Dhulunyagen family clan of Ulupna and the Yorta Yorta, Wurundjeri and Wiradjuri Briggs/McCrae family. An artist of Aboriginal and Italian heritage, her practice critiques and disrupts Eurocentric frameworks that shape institutional understandings of Indigenous identity. Grounded in Indigenous Knowledge systems, Bonini’s work challenges colonial narratives, re-centres Aboriginal perspectives, and explores the intersections of culture, history and representation. Her practice-led research interrogates Western binaries and categorisations historically imposed upon Aboriginal peoples. Through installation, moving image and cultural practice, she examines how Indigenous ways of knowing, doing and being resist these structures and create space for self-determined representations of Aboriginal identity and experience.
Tahmina Maskinyar is a curator, researcher and writer, born in Kabul and raised near the Djarlgarro Beelier (Canning River) on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja in Australia. Tahmina’s professional experience spans academia, not-for-profits, volunteer boards, and government. She is currently the Curator at West Space. In 2024 she produced the Golden Lion winning exhibition kith and kin by artist Archie Moore and curator Ellie Buttrose for the 60th Venice Biennale. Tahmina’s writing has been published nationally. Her doctoral research at Monash University examines the imperial formations that have produced the geopolitical space of Afghanistan and the ways contemporary art practices register, mediate, or contest those conditions.
