I was in love with the place in my rearview mirror

Hillvale Gallery, Brunswick VIC
Returning
Nur Aishah Kenton & Shelley Xue
04.09.26 — 04.10.26

Whenever I open up my iPhone’s photo library, a notification pops up alerting me that my storage is full and any new or pending photos will not be synced. Quickly, as if by rote, I swipe my finger across the screen to clear it from view. I haven’t probed too deeply as to why I’m so reluctant to buy more storage or back up my phone — despite having lost hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures over time. Whole months, even years, of images lost from a mingling of the iPhone’s planned obsolescence and my self-inflicted technological negligence. My current photo library stretches back to 2019 and contains more than 10,000 images. I rarely scroll back these days. The sheer volume feels all too chaotic, a maelstrom of screenshots, selfies and videos, in spite of the increasingly intrusive ways Apple has deployed algorithms to sift through the swaths of content. For the most part, it just feels strange to look back at past versions of life — particularly when some of the only records I have of those moments are AI-generated slideshows set to generic background music, automating the process of looking back.

In contrast to my cluttered memories, so precariously stored in my Photos app, I felt drawn in by two artists who are not offloading memory into a virtual storage system, but tenderly caring for it — letting it be something they keep, assemble and return to themselves. Nur Aishah Kenton and Shelley Xue’s exhibition, Returning, is located in Hillvale Gallery, a small artist-run space attached to Hillvale’s independent photo lab in Brunswick. The exhibition includes ten photographic collages that uniformly line the perimeter of the gallery and oscillate between each artist.  There is a particular focus on each artist’s return to the places they grew up: for Kenton, Malaysia, and for Xue, China. Small-scale, untitled photographs are dotted around the gallery’s wall, offering tiny, fragmentary glimpses into each artist’s life. Specific memories are inscribed — photographs of reunions and family members gathered around the dining table — but it is undisclosed to the viewer which photograph belongs to each artist. In the otherwise austere, fluorescent-washed gallery space, Kenton and Xue decorate the walls like a scrapbook, as if the gallery were an old, sun-faded family album unbound by its staples and lovingly reconstructed.

To my left is the first of Nur Aishah Kenton’s photographic textile collages, Bersama-sama (Together With). Sewn onto a square piece of traditional Batik fabric are two black-and-white photographs stacked above one another. In one image, Kenton gently embraces her mother, both standing in a flowering bush. With her back to the camera, Kenton’s mother melts into her daughter’s clutch — arms limply hanging by her side, heads rest in the dips of each other’s shoulders. Directly below, the same cluster of flowers saturates the picture plane. I find myself thinking about these two photographs, arrested by the camera’s intense concentration on the monochrome bloom, freezing the site of this particular memory. Coupled with the staged photo of Kenton and her mother’s embrace — Kenton and her mother collaborate on each image — I’m left with the lasting impression that embedded in these photographs is the hope that they stay as pictured forever. To let this moment be the telling: what the artist chooses to remember and memorialise — even if it means sometimes suppressing the more complex, perhaps painful, memories of returning home.

Kenton’s relationship with her mother is a central preoccupation of her artistic practice, noticeably standing out from the piles of memories from her trips home, and those she seems to be impelled to revisit and untangle. I stand for a moment with Sayang (to care/love), another of Kenton’s intimately scaled collages on the back wall, where Kenton’s hand cups the back of her mother’s head, brushing her greying hair. Again, Kenton’s mother faces away from the camera, revealing only her side profile. In another work, titled Missed voice call — the only photograph presenting a frontal portrait — Kenton captures her mother behind a profusion of orchids, smelling them with her eyes closed, as if in reverie.  

I look more closely at two of the Batik fabric collages, which are printed copies of text messages between Kenton and her mother. The transcripts are stamped with the exact time and date of each conversation, documenting missed phone calls and messages tinged with maternal concern — 'what have I done to you? It’s me caring, and I do worry abt you' — dating back to 2017. In a conversation with Kenton, she revealed to me that the text message conversations transpired following her relocation to Melbourne. Her reason for printing them out and storing them in a folder for nearly ten years was initially unclear to her. Now, read alongside each other, the two types of records undo a straightforward account of being away from home and coming back. Here, Kenton resists lapsing into an overly romanticised version of nostalgia — the type that polishes memory, ridding it of all those prickly frustrations that move you to regress into your angsty sixteen-year-old self. 

Likewise, the accompanying memories of returning home and leaving again become encoded in the art of Shelley Xue. In each of the minimally decorated collages, Xue affixes a selected few snapshots of her family members onto Japanese Washi paper. Inky, black Mandarin handwriting is scrawled across each sheet of paper, with the exception of one work, titled Returning (Ah Yun & Ah Fen), where seemingly random numbers and calculations, appearing hurriedly written, traverse the page on a slant. The Mandarin characters descend in columns, their lines wobble; they record the pressing of fingers, the tremor of a wrist. Shot in 35mm, the photographs flit between black-and-white imagery and coloured film.  The series pieces together intimate glimpses of Xue’s life — filmic keepsakes of her returns home to Guangdong, China, paired with portraits of her mother taken during her first visit to Xue in Melbourne. 

Unknown to the viewer, the Mandarin handwriting printed on each page are letters co-written by Xue’s paternal grandparents, given to her by her mother during her first visit to Xue in Melbourne. Looking again, afresh with this insight, I turn to one collage, Returning (Shichang), a closely cropped image of Xue’s grandpa’s age-spotted hands beside a coloured portrait of him seated on his bed. I turn to another, Returning (洁, Jie), where a striking image of Xue’s grandma fixes a stoic gaze upon the camera as she stands in front of a crowded waterfall. Overlaid with her grandparents’ letter-writing reaching out from all those many miles away, I’m left with the lasting impression of Xue’s arrangements acting as a kind of psychic anchor to the past. Each carries a hope to assemble, then reassemble the past — selecting and linking memories from two different geographies, and forgoing linear progression, to allow them to exist together —protected on one page, held closely in those moments of longing to return home.

Cutting diagonally across the centre of the gallery, two large sheets of translucent cloth are suspended from the ceiling. Printed on each of the sheer fabric screens is a black-and-white photograph of Kenton and Xue’s mothers. The two photographs are nearly identical in composition: both women face away from the camera, their profiles only partially captured. Together, they are arranged like pendant portraits, each more or less looking in counterpose towards either side of the gallery’s walls. Yet there is a subtle difference in how they pose: in the panel closest to the right, Kenton’s mother appears slightly slumped, her shoulders bowed and chin tucked in — not noticing, perhaps even shielding herself from exposure. In the other, Xue’s mother stands almost classically poised, her head sharply turned to the left. Similarly, they appear preoccupied — unaware of the camera’s, and by extension their daughter’s, unflinching gaze. The more I look, the more I sense an attention so rapt — a kind of outward reaching for their mothers in these unguarded moments, of holding them in wonder and contemplation, as if waiting for something to be uncovered. 

A week or so later, returning to the show again, but this time through the screen of my phone. I gleaned from a video interview on Instagram that the two portraits were not planned or pre-arranged; there was no collusion in their composition, but rather pure happenstance in their striking similarity. These portraits have presence, not only through their scale and display, but in the way they offer a kind of psychological ground. Returning home is a whirlpool of conflicting emotions and experiences — the joy of reunions, the comfort of home, the pressures of familial expectations, the nagging awareness that time is limited. Perhaps this is what the portraits seek to stabilise: the capacious mix of memories and moods, the shifting meanings and forms of home, and the complex and precarious relationships to those who inhabit them. It can be almost overwhelming to look back sometimes, to return to moments now past; there is often a recourse to simply move on and forget. Instead, Kenton and Xue offer another possibility: what it might mean to fill the present with the past, to let memory exist within change itself. Their photographs prolong the before into the after, keeping these memories from becoming mere snapshots, but allowing them to remain — a lifeline when you can no longer go back in time or return to a particular place.

Annabel Brown is an emerging curator and arts writer based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. She is particularly interested in themes of time, subjectivity and precarity in techno-social life, as well as experiences in which ambiguity, simulacrum and elusiveness unfold and become increasingly dominant.

This article was commissioned as part of the KINGS x un Projects Emerging Writers Program, and edited by Emily Kostos.