Sardar Sinjawi

Fairfield City Museum and Gallery
Histories, Memories, Other Territories| 7 July - 19 August 2007

Did I discover art or myself first?

Such an intuitive question that has never left me with a single answer. It grows with me as I grow. I strongly believe that art should be pure, spiritual and left untouched by something that pure art does not want to hold.

After a Beam of Light - Things is an artwork about human experiences of agony and distress, traumatic memories that cannot be easily expressed and are hard to contemplate. Can emotions, smells, colours, sounds and tactile senses all be ingredients of a single memory?

Simply by eating or doing any common daily activity we promise to life that we are going to exist. We believe in the future, it is our instinctive attitude; a natural burst of hope and persistence; breathing.

Similarly, when we wash our clothes and put them on line to dry, we take for granted that we will wear them again, we believe in tomorrow, we project ourselves into the future, into the minutes coming after.
How dramatic and painful it is to leave the clothes on the line with no possibility to come back to collect them!

This installation is a remembrance. The clothes are hanging on the line with no one to collect them. This scene is a single, frozen, fragmented memory, a representation of the physical absence of people. Abandonment. A disposal of fatality.

The clothes for After a Beam of Light - Things have been collected from the Kurdish community in Western Sydney and across Australia.