22.01.2026—22.02.2026
Launch: Wednesday 21 January 2026, 6-8PM
Suck words into grime is an exhibition on process, form and story.
In this short life
with the ringing and
the twisting blues
what can one make?
of thunder in may
but bumble bees swinging
twenty-one white hairs
to nothing -you, your impatience
curled in the wind
with the ultimate gamble in doubt,
only now appreciated
once the dance of your devoted voice
was hidden amongst the grass
July 27th
Just as the Munzur river
glows red at sunset
so too, does the plane of thistles
on the mountains
enveloped by an endless sheer of fire
it seems no greater
than a plot of land
for only one house
"Thank you"
ebbs between us
you are a Universe which neither going
nor coming could displace
- Lara Oluklu
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Naimo Omar
I remake, make, compose and recompose sound, video, print, text and sculpture, in reference to transnational conceptions of Somaalinimo/Somali-ness. The silence of Black life in the archives, and the enmeshment of coloniality in these silences, is resounding. I track a pattern of obsolescence and inertia in its lexis using tools developed within Black Feminist and Deconstructionist discourse. Ultimately, it is a hollowing act of my enfleshed diasporic subjectivity, this practice, a sifting and sifting of form.
Emma Salmon
My name is Emma Salmon and I am an artist of Nyikina and Celtic descent. I live and work on Wurundjeri land in Naarm's northern suburbs. I make string, prints, drawings, videos and installations as a form of catharsis and truth telling, promoting intergenerational healing and challenging prescribed notions of Indigeneity and Australian identity. I've shown at Incinerator Gallery, 138 Gallery and Trocadero Projects and hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Drawing and Printmaking) from VCA. Alongside this I work in theatre as a set and costume designer and maker.
Lara Oluklu
My painting practice is sometimes fixed on looking, and looking again differently: an ongoing whirrrrrr. The relation(s) between literature and poetry, music and ritual, are a point of rapid departure that guide my work. Fragmented connections collide in textured touch. In search of historical pathways, I study and examine their common and/or outlying threads together. I am looking for other possibilities—not reduction—toward something else, another way.
Alanna Baxter
Alanna Baxter is interested in repetition and spectatorship, with particular attention to how modes of viewing are produced and sustained. Working across sculpture, performance and video, their work examines the conditions under which a crowd is addressed as an audience. They are currently developing competencies in karaoke but they also really want everyone to stop looking at them for now.
Image credit: Naimo Omar, various sculptures, 2025, plaster, wood, charcoal, ash
