Celebratory
Narjis Mirza, Joel Sherwood Spring, Luca Leggo, Zainab Hikmet
17/07/2025 - 10/08/2025

The text is a translation of a monologue spoken in the second act of the film, a section in which speech is encountered against an irregular visual frame of sped-up city movements and symphony. Frampton embraces a fractured yet holistic relationship of time and rhythm, ideas or images synthesising after and before their initial placement. The speed of this formulation constantly modulating and disintegrating just as it is newly integrated. A camera accelerates through hundreds of lives passing through a city, to bear the weight of screening such images to the next participants. Surveying motion - as if falling with it - and simultaneously expressing it, a city of diverse cultures, architecture, ideas, and things, is translated, filmed, and digitised.

A similar query is found in celebratory; of works not merely commenting on empirical hierarchies and mythologies of power, but also participating in the sea of rhythms in which these systems are altered, expelled, and opposed. Artworks in the exhibition stem from a global network of circulation, the gallery grid becoming emphasised as a screening of images with extended cultural and digital histories. Tectonic timelines become bendable - tracing back to personal stories of sincerity, lives passing freely against or without occupation, colonial goals acknowledged as children's games, games with the ability to be transmitted and interconnected.

Falling through a sea of motion, separate drifts, surfaces colliding, the artists of celebratory revel in their difference. Narjis Mirza, Joel Sherwood Spring, Luca Leggo, and Zainab Hikmet each approach from separate perspectives of systems of power, their works standing to resist, reinterpret, and disrupt. The often complacent stained-white walls of a gallery become space to be reorganised, to mobilise, and to finally, land into place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U6A-bjeMh4

- Will Naufahu

Curated by Sarah R Serfati

Schmick Contemporary acknowledges the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation upon whose unceded lands we live and work.
We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging.

Level 2, 706 George St, Chinatown

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