“language to reach with”
Moorina Bonini, Nithya Iyer and Chi Tran
22 Aug → 24 Oct 2026
Gallery
Opening Celebration, 29 Aug, 6 – 8 am
language to reach with brings together new works by Moorina Bonini, Chi Tran and Nithya Iyer.
Against the homogenising force of generative AI and the instrumentalisation of language within political rhetoric, each artist offers their personal expression as a critical counterpoint.
The title of the exhibition references Whereas (2017) a book of poetry by Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier. In this book, Long Soldier instates language’s deep participation in life building, an active force that is strengthened by our attention to it. In the prologue of Whereas, Long Soldier says "...each People has been given their own language to reach with, I understand reaching as active, a motion."
Curated by Tahmina Maskinyar.
"Sharing language is a deeply personal and embodied act, expressed by an individual and the people, places and contexts that make up a constellation. Language can be passed down, it evolves and is ever evolving. As a system of knowing and expression, language extends beyond the written word to gesture, mark making and sound. It builds values that allow us to individually and collectively navigate life.
I am interested in ways to celebrate and protect the polyphonies of language and the role of the artist as antidote in a period marked by an increasing presence of generative AI systems."
— Tahmina Maskinyar
Opening Celebration
Saturday 29 August, 4 → 6pm
Join us as we celebrate language to reach with. Everyone is welcome.
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. Bonini has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at ACMI, The Shed (New York), City Gallery Wellington (NZ), Gertrude Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Recent commissions include TarraWarra Biennial 2025: We Are Eagles and RISING Festival (2025). She was a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary (2024–2026) and selected for the highly regarded galang Residency in 2026.
Nithya Iyer is an interdisciplinary researcher of South Indian Tamil-descent. Raised in Melbourne, Australia, she currently resides in Goa, India. Working across performance, photography, installation and writing, Nithya seeks to investigate how the body, and the body-in-motion, relates to notions of inheritance and territory. Her works combine research and form as a means to challenge the parameters of conventional narratives, mediums and aesthetics. This is sought through a pedagogical method centring phenomenology – or the study of consciousness – as a means of emergent knowledge-making. Trained for 15 years in the Indian dance forms of Bharatanatyam and Odissi at the Chandrabhanu Bharatalaya Academy of Dance, Australia, Nithya’s subsequent inquiries often bring these choreographic aesthetics into dialogue with experimental and improvisational mediums. The capacity of the body as a repository of memory as well as an agent of metamorphoses is a strong focus of her solo and collaborative projects.
Chi Tran is a research-based writer and artist, whose works span essay, installation, sound and the moving image. She is interested in how the unseen and intuited can open dormant paths for truth and relation, with her early work exploring failures of language and expression. Her current research interests are histories of independent filmmaking and Vietnamese theology, with her current project looking at French Christian mysticism and its colonial reverberations in Vietnam. She has published and exhibited nationally and internationally, including with Un. Magazine, NGV, Institute of Modern Art, Phoenix Central Park, China Wave, Runway, UTS Gallery, ACCA, Liminal, Art News Aotearoa, NOWNESS Asia and more.