Sydney Jarrett, High beams, 2025. Found object, acrylic, reflective film, debris, fiftydollar note, dimensions variable.

Gallery 1

Fugitives

Curated by Levent Can Kaya with artists Sydney Jarrett, Tabitha Lean, Zeinab Mahfoud & Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis

Penal colony, police state, imperial pawn. From its genesis, Australia has operated as a carceral and militarised state. How are artists responding to a structure that is physical, legal, and material—its legacies and its projections onto other places on the planet? Hijacking, intervention, documentation, glitching—fugitive artistic methods.

The artists in Fugitives deploy these methods, documenting the function of citizenship in looming strikes on South Lebanon, hijacking the material infrastructures of the state, intervening in legal structures that have propelled cycles of dispossession, and glitching technologies of surveillance and control.

Fugitives responds to an urgent need to understand the policed, imperial present by reckoning with the carceral past. It braids together the work of those subsumed by these structures, deploying fugitive methods while proposing ways forward: at times defiant, at others playful.