The Colour of Absence by Miream Salameh

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Syrian-Australian artist Miream Salameh fled her homeland in 2012. This exhibition reflects on what it means to be absent from the place you belong to and the specific qualities of loss and distance that accompany exile.

For Salameh, her monochrome videos express the way memories lose vivid detail and colour through distance or confinement. In contrast, the bright colours of her collages convey optimism, nostalgia and the sense of home Salameh carries with her. This is Salameh’s first solo exhibition in Australia, a significant milestone as she develops a powerful visual language to express her presence in a new place.

Originally programmed to appear at the new Town Hall Broadmeadows gallery, which has been temporarily closed due to the pandemic, The Colour of Absence is now available online. This exhibition is proudly co-presented with Multicultural Arts Victoria. 

View The Colour of Absence by Miream Salameh.  

About the artist

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Artist Bio:

Miream Salameh was born in Homs, Syria in 1983. When the Syrian Revolution broke out in 2011, she was persecuted both as a revolutionary and visual artist. Miream, with her friends, founded a magazine called Justice in which they documented Assad’s abuses in the city of Homs. Due to her involvement in anti-government activism, she was forced to leave her homeland after regime forces made threats of rape, arrest, and murder against her, looting and destroying most of her artwork. With her three remaining artworks, she fled her homeland to Lebanon in 2012 and came to Australia in 2013.

Miream works in painting, sculpture and recently video and performance. Her artwork addresses issues of issues of identity, displacement, conflict especially that related to the suffering of the Syrian people, who are being violently oppressed for resisting dictatorship. She studied at the Fine Art Institute in Syria and practiced with the well-known Syrian sculptor Wael Kasstoun for seven years. She is currently studying a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of Arts (VCA).  Salameh has participated in many group exhibitions in Syria and overseas. In Australia, her work has been shown in the group exhibitions Syrian Story, solo exhibitions in windows Space Beaac in 2015 and The Isolation Cell 185,180, in Thirning Villa Gallery in Sydney in 2019.

Photograph by Damian W Vincenzi.

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When

  • Thursday, 06 August 2020 | 10:00 AM - Sunday, 04 October 2020 | 12:00 AM