“Everything You Can Dream of is True”

11 June → 21 June 2025

Everything You Can Dream of is True is a moving image series that invites a re-imagining of ourselves and the world around us.

Over 20 First Nations, global Indigenous and Diaspora artists interrogate the status quo and and propose new ways of engaging with complex histories, politicised identities and futurisms.

Sparking conversations across Dharug land, Western Sydney, and Wurundjeri land, Melbourne, Everything You Can Dream of is True is a new program by Utp, delivered in partnership with West Space.

The schedule and ticketing will be announced closer to the date.

Participating artists:

Hoda Afshar, Akil Ahamat, Tarik Ahlip, Maissa Alameddine, Paola Balla, Travis De Vries, Jagath Dheerasekara, Kuba Dorabialski, Dictaphone Group (Tania El Khoury, Abir Saksouk, Petra Serhal), Lux Eterna, Riana Head-Toussaint, Roberta Joy Rich, Gillian Kayrooz, Eugenia Lim, Jumana Manna, Hayley Millar Baker, Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Jazz Money, James Nguyen, Katy B Plummer, Khaled Sabsabi, Larissa Sansour, Feras Shaheen, Subash Thebe Limbu.

Day 1

The first event in this new moving image series brings together First Nations and Diaspora artists, foregrounding narratives surrounding body and land.

Session 1

In this session, the artists invite us to critically consider our relationships to place and the self, through intimate and communal visual imagery.

• Gillian Kayrooz, Leave your shoes at the door
• Eugenia Lim, Letter to Corhanwarrabul
• Jazz Money, WINHANGANHA
• Riana Head Toussaint, First Language

Session 2

Centring connection to land explored through oral storytelling and auto-fiction, this session brings into focus questions around our individual and collective responsibilities for disruption and continuity.

• Maissa Alameddine, Act I: Burden
• Jagath Dheerasekara, Break The Cinnamon Branch
• Jumana Manna, Foragers
• James Nguyen, Nam Tiếng

There will be a post-screening conversation with Eugenia Lim and James Nguyen after this session.

Day 2

The works in this session visualise origins and ends - real and unreal - centering imagination as form of intervention.

Session 1

• Tarik Ahlip, 31.05.2010
• Hoda Afshar, Undone
• Travis De Vries, The Last Question
• Lux Eterna, The 8th Day

Session 2

Foregrounding women as inheritors and creators of histories, myths and counter-narratives.

• Hayley Millar Baker, Nyctinasty
• Sancintya Mohini Simpson, The Language of Indenture
• Katy B Plummer, THE WITCH LAYS HER EGGS IN TERRIBLE CLUMPS
• Larissa Sansour, In Vitro

Post-screening conversation with the artists to be announced.

Day 3

Session 1

• Paola Balla, Mok Mok Murrup Yakuwa
• Akil Ahamat, Dawn of a day too dark to call tomorrow
• Khaled Sabsabi, 40
• Subash Thebe Limbu, Ningwasum

Session 2

• Roberta Joy Rich, Remembering District 6
• Kuba Dorabialski, You Can’t The Fire
• Feras Shareen, Humanising
• Dictaphone Group (Tania El Khoury, Abir Saksouk, Petra Serhal), Nothing to Declare

Post-screening conversation with the artists to be announced.

Curated by Eddie Abd and Rachelle Esaid, Utp, Sydney, Everything You Can Dream of is True is supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

Hoda Afshar was born in Tehran, Iran and is now based in Naarm/Melbourne. Working across photography and moving-image, her practice explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making, considering the representation of gender, marginality, and displacement. Hoda employs processes that disrupt traditional image-making practices, play with the presentation of imagery, or merge aspects of conceptual, staged, and documentary photography.

Akil Ahamat is a Sri Lankan Malay artist, filmmaker and arts worker currently based on Ngunnawal land. Akil’s work across video, sound, performance and installation considers the physical and social isolation of online experience and its effects in configuring contemporary subjectivity. Among their research influences, they draw especially on the use of ASMR in online spaces as a self-administered therapeutic tool, translating its restorative effects into intimate audio experiences in the public space of the gallery.

Tarik Ahlip is a multidisciplinary artist working on Dharug and Gadigal land. Working across film, sculpture, verse and sound, Tarik's practice considers poetics as capable of driving epistemic change.

Maissa Alameddine grew up in Tripoli, Lebanon and now lives and works on the unceded lands of the Cammeraygal and Darug peoples, Sydney. She is a multidisciplinary artist and vocalist, who explores the idea of migration as a chronic injury and uses her voice as a provocation and a response.

Paola Balla is a Wemba Wemba and Gunditjmara artist, writer, curator and educator. She focuses on Aboriginal women's stories and resistance with a visual practice, encapsulating research, art, memory and narrative realms. Her work centres Aboriginal women’s voices, activism, Sovereignty, and matriarchy and First Nations ways of being, knowing and doing.

Travis De Vries is Gamilaroi and Dharug artist from country NSW whose work is a commentary on Indigenous and Blak ideologies through a futurism lens, often making satirical statements about the bureaucratisation of the Indigenous identity. Travis is the founder of Awesome Black.

Jagath Dheerasekara is an inter-media artist in Sydney. His work is informed by incidents of fragility in the principles of humanity and also involves facilitating community cultural art projects. In the early 1990s he was forced to leave Sri Lanka owing to political and human rights activism and granted political asylum in France, before moving to Australia.

Kuba Dorabialski is an artist, writer and educator from Wrocław, Poland now based in Sydney. Working primarily in video installation, Kuba is interested in mysticism, political history and the personal poetic; his tools are geography, language and cinema history. Kuba has exhibited in the US, across Europe and Australia.

Tania El Khoury creates interactive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory and visual materials collated by the artist and her collaborators, and transformed through audience interaction. Tania’s work engages questions of displacement, border systems, privatisation, and the politics of space in how they are shaped through nation building projects and colonial legacies.

Lux Eterna is a Western Sydney based interdisciplinary artist exploring the embodied gaze, authoring post-human futures, decolonisation and awareness. Lux’s work posits embodied sensitivities, imagination and awareness for initialisation of and at the interstices of drawing, dance, cinema, video, sound and performance.

Riana Head-Toussaint is an interdisciplinary disabled artist, who uses a manual wheelchair for mobility. Her work crosses traditional artform boundaries, and exists in online and offline spaces. Enduring concerns are agency, representation, the limits of empathy, and how these impact people across different marginalised intersections. Her work is deeply informed by her experiences as a disabled woman of Afro-Caribbean descent, and her training as a legal practitioner.

Roberta Joy Rich is an artist, curator and educator. Drawing upon her lived experiences as a diaspora Southern African 'Cape' woman with Afro-Asian lineages, Roberta uses language, text, video, archives, photo-media, satire and storytelling to interrogate constructs of race, gender, imperialism, Western singularity and notions of authenticity. Roberta's work aims to deconstruct colonial modalities whilst proposing empowering sites of collective self-determination.

Gillian Kayrooz’s work across film and installation is grounded in observations of her immediate surroundings and has evolved into a practice that re-authors personal histories through experimental modes of non-linear storytelling. Her practice is informed by personal experience and connection to place, and invites the specificities of culture and community to push against socially dictated boundaries of cultural stereotypes and socio-economic related stigmas.

Eugenia Lim is an artist of Chinese Singaporean descent who works across body, lens, social and spatial practice to explore how national identities, migration and capital cut, divide and bond our interdependent world. A performer within her own works, Eugenia invents personas to explore the tensions of the individual within society – the alienation and belonging in a globalised world.

Jumana Manna is an artist raised in Jerusalem, living in Berlin. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, and filmmaking, Jumana deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and its regeneration.

Hayley Millar Baker is a lens-based artist in Naarm/Melbourne. Her identity is deeply rooted in her Aboriginality, belonging to Gunditjmara, Djabwurrung, and Nira-Bulok Taungurung peoples through her maternal lineage, with Anglo-Indian and Portuguese-Brazilian ancestry on her paternal side. This blend of influences shapes Hayley’s sense of self, worldview and artistic vision, infusing her work with a rich sense of history, identity, and spirituality, offering perspectives that deeply inform and enhance the themes in her work.

Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a descendant of indentured labourers sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in South Africa. Her work navigates the complexities of migration, memory, and trauma—addressing gaps and silences within the colonial archive. Simpson’s work moves between painting, video, poetry, and performance to develop narratives and construct rituals that reflect on her maternal lineage.

Jazz Money is a Wiradjuri poet and artist based on Gadigal land, Sydney. Jazz's practice is centred around poetics while producing works that encompass installation, digital, performance, film and print. Jazz's writing has been widely published nationally and internationally, and performed on stages around the world. Jazz’s first poetry collection, the best-selling how to make a basket was the 2020 winner of the David Unaipon Award.

James Nguyen's interdisciplinary practice moves between live and online performance, video, drawing and installation. He often makes work in collaboration with family and friends, inviting them to respond to specific sites using readily available materials. Processes of research and conversation play key roles in his practice, which examines strategies of decolonisation, while also interrogating the politics of family history, displacement and diaspora.

Katy B Plummer is an artist living and working on stolen Gadigal land. She has a BFA from UNSW and and MFA from the School of Visual Art in New York. She is interested in ghosts, cinematic storytelling, anachronistic textile practices and high school theatre aesthetics. Her work suggests that history is a haunted house, and that violence, poetry and witchcraft are legitimate political strategies. Katy has shown nationally and internationally.

Khaled Sabsabi migrated with his family from Tripoli to Australia in 1978 following the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon. They settled in Western Sydney, where Sabsabi now lives and works. Since the late 1980s Sabsabi has worked with communities, particularly those in Western Sydney, to create and develop arts programs and projects that explore the complexities of place, displacement, identity and ideological differences associated with migrant experiences and marginalisation.

Larissa Sansour was born in East Jerusalem, Sansour (PS/DK) studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. She represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, KINDL in Berlin, Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark and Dar El-Nimer in Beirut. Larissa lives and works in London.

Feras Shaheen is curious in letting his conceptual interests lead him across a variety of mediums. Working with choreography, installation work, film, performance, design, and street dance, the core of Feras’ practice is to connect and engage audiences. He seeks to bring activism into his art practice, with outcomes that are accessible and community centred. Feras subverts traditional relationships between mediums to challenge audiences' perspectives, specifically to disrupt colonial discourses and reduce Western reliance on neutrality and apathy.

Subash Thebe Limbu is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from Yakthung Nation (Limbuwan) from what we currently know as eastern nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, and painting. His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction. Notion of time, climate change, and indigeneity or Adivasi Futurism as he calls it, are recurring themes in his works.