Machine Residue – Curated by Yi Li
Trocadero Projects
1 October – 2 November 2025
In the accompanying exhibition text, curator Yi Li writes that Machine Residue, recently shown at Trocadero Projects, 'does not seek one single narrative, but rather an assemblage of lived and imagined experiences that ... disrupt reductive representations, and reveal the complex residues of war, migration, and survival'.1 The group exhibition’s multi-modality – Ma Ei’s photographic series, bAg’s (Pyae Phyo Thu) suite of paintings, Safa El Samad’s embroidered textiles, and Ammar Yonis’ textually oriented installation – certainly gestures to this disruption of history’s singular authoritative voice. A voice that is hegemonic and removed, acquiring its authority from its purported objectivity. Situated in gallery one and occupying a little over a third of the exhibition space, the artworks’ disparateness of form is exacerbated by their close proximity to one another, as well as a lack of wall labels to break up the continuity of the space’s whiteness. Yet this seeming discordance is effective in giving material weight to the exhibition’s provocation: that any one medium is inadequate in narrating histories. Machine Residue seems to imply that challenging History’s orthodoxy of singularity begins with expanding its modes of telling.
The most direct response to history’s privileged mode of narration is Yonis’ The Other Stories, a series of short fiction stories, printed on A4 paper and displayed on the wall. The exhibition text describes this work as 'weaving memory and fiction' by taking as its point of departure the 'first-hand experiences of the artist’s family'.2 Yonis’ auto-fictional anthology, displayed as books to be perused on a low plinth, challenges two boundaries: that which delineate fact from fiction, and the geographical and cultural borders crossed by the artist (and his family) when migrating from Harari, Ethiopia to so-called Australia. Refracting personal and cultural histories through the prism of fiction has enjoyed a long tradition, both within literature and the fine arts – and here Yonis does just that. Yonis’ text-based installation is in dialogue with the premier institution of the literary and the visual, the book and the gallery. The Other Stories, as vignettes of auto-fictional texts, allows for the minutiae of life to be told without sacrificing the opacity denied to racialised peoples. These nuances and specificities, so essential in the humanisation of subjects, are often erased in the focus on grand narratives and grander figures. Fiction thus allows the telling of life’s intimacies without restaging the breach of privacy immigrants are often subjected to – breaches of privacy and dignity that include everything from the invasive and pedantic procedures of visa applications to the policing of brown and Bla(c)k people’s neighbourhoods.3
Yonis’ weaving of history through his fictional anthology is made more potent when viewed through the frame of his installation. Noticeably absent in Li’s exhibition text, the staging of a Harari household’s living room does more than re-inscribe the temporal and spatial scripts of the gallery – we are invited to stay, to sit on the sofa, and to read Yonis’ book. The familial intimacy of the stories is also paralleled by the fact that it is a domestic setting. And while admittedly, the simulation of the household’s privacy did not completely dispel the publicness of the white-cube gallery that surrounded me, a sense of home was still evoked. This evocation comes particularly from the array of ge mot on the wall. Predominantly practised by Harari women, the weaving of ge mot requires both a dexterity of hand and mind. The reverence for this art form is such that traditional domestic Harari architecture was oriented around them.4 The ge mot’s display communicates Harari histories as this weaving symbolised and facilitated a commitment to family and community. Their geometric patterns, varying in each concentric layer of the baskets, also echo the song cycles of Papunya Tula that similarly narrate the histories of the creation of Country as they recount familial and personal memories. In visibly manifesting the weave through its patterns, the ge mot parallels the histories wrought within The Other Stories. Thus, the arrangement of the different types of ge mot baskets – waskambai, etan mudai and gufta muda among others – is at once a manifestation of a living art praxis as it is a physical connection between Ethiopia and its diaspora on Wurundjeri Country.
The expansion of history’s mediums continues in El Samad’s Textiles in Gaza. This embroidered piece is a recreation of a work originally conceived by the artist in an 'alternative architecture drawing class,' exemplary of El Samad’s background as an architect perceptible in the innovative treatment of space across the fabric’s surface.5 Through the transposition of the images and videos from Gaza that proliferate our screens onto textile, we are reminded that for many in Palestine, fabric is not mere clothing but also serves as material for (makeshift) architecture. El Samad’s interpolation of these horrific scenes confronts us with fragmentation and its residue, that of ruins. In Textiles we see the kuffiyeh’s olive leaf pattern dispersed across the fabric, the wholeness of military weaponry contrasted with the wreckage of Gaza and even the faint outline of tent, all enclosed by the rectangular cloth’s raw edge. But the explicit commentary on Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine is not a simple re-presentation of violent destruction.
The materiality of the cloth itself seems a solidification of the flow of images and videos we have all witnessed coming out of Gaza. The fabric has a demanding immediacy that beckons the body; an initiative towards a more somatic relation to Palestinian people. Yet, even as the material’s tangibility evokes this immediate touch, Textiles is temporally multivalent, recalling the etymology of ‘gauze’ and the textile tradition that forms part of Palestine’s history. El Samad’s work thus speaks twice: as a ‘political’ statement against atrocity and an 'aesthetic sensoriality' that heightens the viewer’s awareness of their body.6 Our (my) privilege of distance manifests in El Samad’s polyptych-like structure of both Textiles and Love. The division into three rectangular panels of Textiles’ surface and the diptych formation of Love, in permitting gaps, situates the viewer in the safe space of the gallery – in the case of the latter, the intrusion of the white gallery walls fissures the dense embroidery, breaking the 'حب' (a broken, breaking heart?). Signifying the safety of our distance, these breakages nevertheless bring attention to the need for connection, for a transnational solidarity.
Ei’s series of photographs, Where is A Place for Me to Sleep in Peace?, contends with the safety of distance in an almost comedic way. The artist’s repose is a performance of peace and relaxation, just as her relaxed form is symbolic of vulnerability: a sleeping form as unguarded, sleep as something inevitably succumbed to, and Ei clad only in a short red night gown ordinarily meant for the intimacy and privacy of a bedroom. Is the sartorial choice a commentary on the sexual and gender-based violence experienced by many refugees? The penultimate picture seems to break the photographic series’ theatricality just as it intensifies the series’ satirical poignancy. Here, the gaze of the gallery-goer is transferred into the scene of the picture, our stares embodied in those of the masked woman and the man on the bicycle. Ei’s act is at once heightened and revealed, pointing out the absurd abnormality and real horror of displacement met with our state’s inhumane treatment of people seeking asylum. The seriality of the photographs, 'tracing [Ei’s] personal journey' of being a refugee, is effective in narrating the multiple forced migrations that the artist, and many others, have had to endure in order to arrive at a (relatively) safe harbour, here irreverently represented by Brighton Beach.7 For by ending the series here in Naarm, Ei questions whether so-called Australia is really a safe place for her to sleep. In this last photo, Ei too reminds the viewer that 'physical separation from violence does not mean peace'.8 That the safety of one’s own homeland will always be absent, particularly for the precarious legal position of refugees. In narrating the particularity of her own lived experience, Ma Ei reframes the anonymised photos of migrants and refugees typically captured by an unempathetic lens.
Painting, the conventional medium with which the artist bAg works, belies the subversive nature of their paintings. More easily legible to cultural outsiders, the large canvases 60mm Mortar Rounds and Peace and War, much like their titles, are more explicit commentary on Myanmar’s military-industrial complex and the subsequent violence that both the Burmese people and their land have been subject to. ဆင်သေကို ဆိတ်ရေနှင့်ဖုံး (Cover the dead elephant with goat's milk.) and The Wound of the Goat seem a simple continuation of the artist’s depiction of 'wounded animals and devastated natural environment [as a means to] signify the destruction of humanity, literally and metaphorically'.9 Yet, these representational images of a goat and elephant act as clandestine forms of communication. ဆင်သေကို ဆိတ်ရေနှင့်ဖုံး (Cover the dead elephant with goat's milk.) is a proverbial phrase which connotes an attempt to cover a large problem with a weak excuse. Goat and mind on the other hand, pronounced ‘sate’ and ‘hcate’ respectively, imbue The Wound of the Goat with the potential for a multiplicity of meanings: at once an indictment on the herd mentality of Burmese soldiers carrying out repressive acts of violence towards their fellow countrymen, as well as concomitantly pointing to the mental and physical trauma of the Burmese people living under a violent military rule. bAg thus pictorially concretises the abstract proverbial, mounting a piercing telling of their experience of the Myanmar civil war.
Machine Residue’s expansion of dominant and singular histories’ modes of telling exemplifies the possibilities of including many voices in its narration. Li’s exhibition has allowed for a past to be told that is grounded in the present – with the fallacious distinction of local and global dissolved – as it holds on to our future’s promise.
[1] Exhibition text at Machine Residue, exhibition at Trocadero Projects, Melbourne, October 1 2025 to November 2 2025.
[2] Exhibition text at Machine Residue, 2025.
[3] Leanne Weber, “Systemic racism, violence, and the over-policing of minority groups in Victoria,” Monash University, published June 22, 2020, https://lens.monash.edu/2020/06/22/1380706/systemic-racism-violence-and-the-over-policing-of-ethnic-minority-groups.
[4] Belle Asante Tarsitani, 'Revered Vessels: Custom and Innovation in Harari Basketry,' African Arts 42, no.1 (Mar 2009): 69, doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar.2009.42.1.64.
[5] Safa El Samad (@safaelsamad), 'I originally created this piece during @markromei’s alternative architecture drawing class last year. I was looking into textiles in Gaza and thought that using textiles as the medium would tell a better story,' Instagram, September 30, 2025, https://www.instagram.com/p/DPP9xGZEp6N/.
[6] Claire Bishop, 'The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,' Artforum, February, 2006, https://www.artforum.com/features/the-social-turn-collaboration-and-its-discontents-173361/.
[7] Exhibition text at Machine Residue, 2025.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.