An exhibition of works by Jomakhan Jafari and Danny Kennedy.

Based on interviews with Auburn (Western Sydney) residents about dreams, the two artists have collaborated to present an artistic interpretation of these dreams. The exhibition was developed by the Peacock Gallery (Auburn Council) and has been toured to Mosman to mark Harmony Day celebrations.

Artists statement

Every night the dreamers of Auburn travel to thousands of different places. Many go around the world, to unseen places, or simply down a local street. People re-live events from their past, have extraordinary experiences, or just go about their daily lives, worries and hopes. It is this combination of geography and memory, the fantastical and the mundane, the local and the global that allows dreams to sketch a complex portrait of a city and its individuals.

Jomakhan Jafari and Danny Kennedy have interviewed local residents about their dreams, and have interpreted these using Persian calligraphy and photography. In some cases photographs have been overlayed with calligraphy. This layering of text onto images suggests the individual and collective layers of meaning we attach to the places, objects and people around us. It is this mesh of associations which makes up the psychogeography of a place, and is the substance of dreams.

The everyday exterior of a city belies the dreamscape which lies within it. Danny Kennedy’s photographs are largely “straight” images of the suburban landscape of Auburn, which contrast with the often dramatic dreams they refer to. Only staged or strange details within the images hint at the interior life of the city they refer to.

Jomakhan Jafari’s calligraphic works are created with a dark and tactile resist technique using tar and petrol. The swirling, overlayed and repeated letters which are the hallmark of the “siyah mashq” calligraphy style are inherently suited to describing dreams. There is hidden logic within the apparent chaos, symbols reoccur, forms appear and melt back into the blackness of the tar. The calligraphy is predominantly composed of words from the dreams themselves, while in some cases it graphically suggests objects and movements within the dreams.

Auburn is a multicultural city, and over half its residents were born overseas. In dreams different places, times, cultures and ideas alternate and converge, suggesting that beyond the physical dichotomy of “here” and “there”, “then” and “now”, there is a space within our minds where past and present, different locations and experiences sit side by side, merge, converse, argue and form new ideas. This is the reality which this exhibition refers to.

Translation: Aydin Pourmoslemi

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