Isle of Refuge

Isle of Refuge highlights the plight of asylum seekers in detention centres in Australia and the South Pacific.
Isle features artworks by 13 prominent Australian visual artists united in their opposition to the recent treatment of refugees by the Australian government. Through painting, installation, sculpture and video, the artists have engaged with issues including: the conditions inside the detention centres, the children overboard affair, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, their own experiences of refugeehood, and the history of former refugee arrivals who now form an integral part of the Australian community.
Many of the artists came to Australia as a result of war and political or racial persecution. Chinese-Vietnamese painter My Le Thi, who is both one of the curators and an exhibitor in Isle, fled Vietnam to escape the victimisation of ethnic Chinese that occurred there as a result of Vietnam’s 1979 war with China. She has been visiting the Villawood Detention Centre for some months now, where she has been encouraging detainees to work through their trauma by creating artworks with her. Her exhibit in Isle will consist of a large chain link fence replete with razor wire to which will be attached artworks and other artefacts produced by asylum seekers in Villawood, as well as her trademark painted plaster face and foot castes, taken from detainees and brought out of the centre with no little risk and ingenuity.
George Gittoes, painter and maker of the documentary “Tales from a Suitcase” (screened on SBS TV), will exhibit works he produced as a result of his experiences in pre and post-war Afghanistan. These confronting images give us a powerful sense of some of the conditions Afghan refugees have fled, and those to which they fear to return.
Indigenous Australian painter Gordon Bennett’s take on these issues is slightly different. He says his overpowering feeling of empathy with the detained refugees comes from the fact that Aboriginal people have a deep historical understanding of the reality of imprisonment - both in the physical sense of internment but also in the psychological sense of being excluded, reviled and isolated.
Meanwhile, Reg Mombassa (Chris O’Doherty) takes a much more satirical perspective on the situation through works such as his “Australian Jesus Welcomes the Boat People”, as well as his representation of himself as a nerdy, thick-accented, gumboot-wearing refugee from New Zealand to Australia.
What emerges most strongly from the show is a sense of how Australia has been an invaluable isle of refuge for many of the exhibitors, and the determination of all that it should continue to offer refuge to those in need now and in the future.