Sofya Gollan

Sofya Gollan is a Deaf multidisciplinary artist working across moving image, photography, sculpture and experimental storytelling. Bilingual in English and Auslan, her practice investigates how language is received, delayed, fragmented and reassembled through Deaf experience. She works with speech, sign and animated text in staggered relation, using these formal delays to shape perception and meaning. Gollan positions silence as a site of Deaf sovereignty rather than absence. Through infrared capture, visual distortion and semi-narrative structures, she makes the movement of language visible beyond surface reception. Her current practice extends this inquiry into animation, textural language sculpture and still photography, exploring how Deaf perception can generate new visual and spatial forms.

Recent works include THRESHOLD (2023), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia through Artscreen, and IMAGINED TOUCH (2024), a documentary exploring Deafblind sensory experience. THRESHOLD received the Agnes Varda Memorial Intersectional Storytelling Prize at Ephemera Experimenta in London and was highly commended at the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize. IMAGINED TOUCH screened at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and ACMI Documentary Festival, and won the AWGIE Award for Best Short Documentary Screenplay. Gollan has undertaken multiple residencies and as part of the DEF Collective will take up a Bundanon residency in November. In 2026 she is part of the cohort of PAS Artists, undertaking a year-long studio residency at Parramatta Artists’ Studios.

@bolshiebird

sofyagollan.com.au