“language to reach with”
Moorina Bonini, Chi Tran and Nithya Iyer
22 Aug → 17 Oct 2026
Gallery
language to reach with brings together new works by Moorina Bonini, Chi Tran and Nithya Iyer within the West Space gallery. This group exhibition offers counter possibilities to the ever increasing homogenisation and weaponisation of language through AI systems and rhetoric agendas.
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. Language builds values to navigate a life.
The title of the exhibition references the words of Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier in Whereas (2017). This critical book of poetry articulates language’s deep participation in life, whilst also highlighting the manner it has been wielded to facilitate genocides, ongoing colonisations and ultimately disconnected beings. 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.
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.
Chi Tran is a writer and artist, whose texts and moving-image works blend elements of autotheory, philosophy and film. She is interested in writing outside of Western institutional traditions of expression and faith. Chi works from a research-based and often collaborative process, asking how the imaginary might reveal dormant paths for relation and understanding. Chi has published, exhibited and has held public programs widely, including with the National Gallery of Victoria, Institute of Modern Art, Runway Journal, ACCA, NOWNESS Asia, TCB, Un. Magazine, Art News NZ, and more.
Nithya Iyer is an interdisciplinary researcher of South Indian Tamil-descent. Raised in Melbourne, Australia, she currently resides in Lisbon, Portugal. Working across performance, photography, installation and writing, Nithyaseeks to investigate how the body, and the body-in-motion, relate to notions of inheritance, embodiment and territory. Her work dialogues between research and form as a means to reimagine the parameters of conventional cultural and historical narratives and aesthetics. Trained in the Indian dance form of Bharatanatyam, Nithya’s practice combines experimental and improvisational interventions to explore new choreographic possibilities. This is accompanied by a pedagogical method instilled at the Melbourne Institute for Experiential and Creative Art Therapy, centring phenomenology – or the study of consciousness – as a means of emergent knowledge-making. 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.