Introductory Note: The Problem of Notation
What does it mean to take note of a place? To observe it, record it, mark it: without seeking to fix or contain it? This deceptively simple question underpins the intellectual premises of the exhibition HOME 25 – Invisible Cities shown in Dandenong between 21 June and 27 September 2025.[1] In a context shaped by forced migration, colonial conditions and cultural layering, to ‘take note’ is never a neutral act. It is a gesture of attention and a claim to legibility, but also one of implication and risk.
Writing from within the curatorial process brings a persistent tension: how to engage analytically with a project still unfolding, one in which I am deeply implicated. What follows is a situated reflection, a field of notes, a speculative topography that traces the conceptual ground of HOME 25 and my passage through it. Here, the notebook becomes not only a metaphor for curating, but also for writing itself; a holding space for emergent thought, provisional conclusions and partial perspectives.
Presented by City of Greater Dandenong, since 2016 the HOME program is dedicated to showcase the work of artists with refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds. The remit of this latest iteration has expanded to look at stories of displacement and diaspora as well as connection to place and Country. Therefore, the sixteen participating artists — many of whom are refugees, first- or second-generation migrants, or First Nations descendants of forced displacement — propose works that bear witness to the pain of exile and to the complexities of mobility, whether chosen or imposed.[2] Their art spans global, (post)national, and hyperlocal registers, mediating between the visible and the invisible, the said and the unsayable.
HOME 25 unfolds across a constellation of sites: Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre, Drum Theatre, Heritage Hill Museum and Historic Gardens, Dandenong Library and public spaces. At the Dandenong Market, products and stories of ‘home,’ namely Market Memoires, are presented by a selection of stallholders each Saturday, to anchor themes of the exhibition in lived materiality.[3] These venues are nodal points where personal and collective experience converge.
Note 1. The Notebook as Method and Ethic
‘To note,’ the Latin nota, is a mark made to draw attention. Notation is never innocent: it selectively highlights, renders visible, and in doing so, exposes itself to the possibility of deletion. In the context of curatorial work, especially one embedded in histories of dislocation, the act of noting can be a form of situated witnessing. Annotation and redaction are part of what academic writer Christina Sharpe calls ‘wake work,’ a method of attending to and registering ‘that which has been disappeared, and which our contemporary modes of representing history rarely acknowledge.’[4] In this light, annotation is an ethical practice of living ‘in the wake’ of historical and ongoing violence, a refusal to let erasure stand unchallenged.
The curatorial logic of HOME 25 is mindful of this act. The exhibition’s framing materials, for instance — such as the printed guide that is part map, part booklet — signal a departure from the authoritative voice of traditional exhibition signage. Visitors are not necessarily directed but invited to drift, draw, dwell, return. The guide becomes a margin: a paratext that suggests associative rather than didactic navigation. (Please note: its failure or success is yet to be determined.)
The notebook, in this sense, may operate as method and ethic. It refuses resolution in favour of relation; it accepts fragmentation as a condition of knowing. This methodology is particularly resonant in Dandenong, Victoria: Australia’s most culturally diverse municipality and a Refugee Welcome Zone since 2002. With more than forty different spoken languages and complex histories of movement, Dandenong itself defies mapping in any singular or stable form. The city is akin to a living palimpsest; a spatial notebook overwritten by displacement, labour, memory and resistance.
Note 2. Against the Cartographic: Critical Geography and Psychogeography
Traditional cartography aspires to legibility, as much as control and fixity. As Irit Rogoff argues in her book Terra Infirma, maps often perform as devices that suppress contradiction in place of coherence.[5] This logic is inseparable from colonial projects of spatial domination: to map is to name, and to name is to claim. Yet what of the spaces that refuse this naming, spaces that remain illegible, fugitive, or only partially visible? Labelled as the ‘city of opportunity’ and promoted through a multicultural branding that contends with structural inequalities, Dandenong is one of those spaces.
The title of the exhibition references Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1972), where geography is speculative and cities are never empirically verifiable, conjured as projections of language, memory and desire.[6] So each artwork, and encounter, is a kind of invisible city: partial, contradictory, layered. The curatorial notebook participates in this approach, remaining accountable to its own situatedness. It offers, quietly but deliberately, a counter to the illusion of detached objectivity.[7] The HOME 25 public program reflects as it foregrounds participation, storytelling, and imaginative reworking of place. This included a Hip-hop Punjabi Cipher, a cross-cultural night of music, dance, and indoor graffiti; Hakaya of Home by Palestinian artist and community leader Aseel Tayah, centring community-driven performance and storytelling; and Reworlding Dandy, a placemaking urban role-playing game led by artist and academic Troy Innocent for RMIT’s Future Play Lab, which speculates on how Dandenong might be reimagined in 2050.[8]
Moreover, the exhibition adopts a psychogeographic sensibility.[9] Originating in the Situationist tradition, psychogeography is concerned with how spatial arrangements impact emotion and politics. By encouraging viewers to meander through Dandenong’s urban fabric — between galleries, theatre, shopping centres, historic sites and civic institutions — HOME 25 attempts to foster a dérivelike experience: an errant mapping shaped by perception and memory before destination.
Note 3. Fragmentation as Resistance: Reading the Works as Notes
If artworks in the exhibition function as discrete marks, fragments that invite enquiry, to engage with them is to trace a dispersed archive, assembling knowledge through juxtaposition and resonance, not through linearity. I will note some of these encounters.
letter to a friend (2019) by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, occupies the historic domestic site of Heritage Hill Museum and Historic Gardens, the first oral history centre to be established in Australia in the 1980s. Structured as a personal address to architect Eyal Weizman, the video reflects on Jacir’s family home in Bethlehem, a site now disrupted by Israeli occupation. The house reads as a layered spatial document, thick with absence. Jacir’s voiceover performs an affective annotation, situating the domestic as both architectural and political terrain. Staging a poetics of incompletion, the work dwells in what has been obscured or lost and asks a critical question: Does a place still exist if only in one’s memory?
Similarly, Hangman (2025), a six-channel sound and video work by Yuin artist and scholar Hayden Ryan deals with absence through a lens of archival distortion. The installation was located within the historic gardens of Heritage Hill, framed by two ancient Moreton Bay fig trees. Visitors can sit on logs arranged in a formation resembling a yarning circle around a firepit, established during the exhibition opening event. Drawing on records from Council Oral History’s collection, Ryan integrates sound glitches and speculative narrative techniques into a visual and sonic meditation on the colonial erasure of Aboriginal presence within Western institutional archives. The children’s word game ‘hangman’ is taken as a metaphor for epistemic violence: the substitution of silence for speech, loss for presence. Annotation here is rupture: a refusal to let the archive speak unchallenged.
At Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre, Warumungu artist Joseph (Yugi) Williams Jungurayi, of the Tennant Creek Brio, offers an intervention into extractive cartographies. His painted overlays on mining maps of Tennant Creek do not simply contest colonial claims; they transform the map into a sacred record, one in which ancestral knowledge reclaims and reanimates Country. In Knowledge Man (2025) and Brother Teach the Other (2025), for instance, Williams inscribes songlines over geological survey markers, reframing the land as a living narrative rather than a resource to be exploited.
In dialogue with Williams’ maps is an installation by Kurdish-Australian and Thailand-based artist Rushdi Anwar. When You Pray for Black Gold, You Must Deal with the Burning Smoke Too (2023) features a traditional Kurdish prayer rug overlaid with an embroidered map dividing Southwest Asia into ethnic territories, including Kurdish lands. Positioned beneath digitally manipulated portraits of diplomats Mark Sykes (Great Britain) and François Georges-Picot (France) — rendered in imperial red and blue — the installation addresses the long-standing consequences of the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement. This secret colonial pact between Britain and France carved up the former Ottoman Empire into imperial spheres, setting in motion a century of conflict and erasure. The prayer mat, oriented towards Mecca, becomes a potent symbol of religious devotion intersecting with political betrayal, while the hovering ghostly portraits—etched with jagged, imposed borders—serve as a haunting reminder of the lasting impact of imperial design. The installation enacts a visual plea for Kurdish sovereignty, its absence underscored by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which did not recognise Kurdistan as a state and dispersed its people across neighbouring nations. In this work, annotation screams of indictment: a record of historical injustice that insists on being remembered.
Another installation by Anwar, The Patterns of Displacement in Context of Home (2017), is a material archive of refugee precarity. Constructed from 330 fabric pieces hand-signed by children in the Arbat Refugee Camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, the tent appears as a counter-monument to erasure. Inside, a video loop of children’s laughter and play introduces an unexpected tonal register: joy as defiance. Anwar’s work insists that to annotate is to remember, to hold, to grieve. The notebook can also be a memorial technology.
Note 4. Annotations of Placement: from Gallery to Plaza
To avoid remaining within sanctioned art spaces, HOME 25’s notational gestures spill into the civic sphere, where they unsettle habits of looking and remembering. Hazara Exodus (2009–2012), for instance, by Barat Ali Batoor is a photographic installation suspended within Dandenong Plaza. Chronicling the artist’s own perilous migration as a persecuted minority from Afghanistan to Australia, the work fragments documentary photography into spatial encounters.
Installed in a civic thoroughfare, the images interrupt everyday circulation. They do not monumentalise trauma, but embed it into daily movement, insisting on a politics of proximity and existence. Inviting re-interpretation with each passing, Batoor’s work embodies what Ariella Azoulay calls a ‘civil contract of photography,’ an ethical encounter that demands co-witnessing.[10] The decision to place this work in a busy shopping area—a site of commerce, encounter and public gathering—extends the notebook’s ethos. The annotation is now literal: viewers must pause, look up, and consider.
The artist’s documentary, Batoor: A Refugee Journey (2021), was screened at the Drum Theatre during the exhibition opening, marking the conclusion of Refugee Week. Narrated by Batoor himself, the film serves as another literal notebook: voiceover, photographs, and journal-like entries narrate the harrowing sea journey via people-smuggling routes. At some point during the journey, in Kuala Lumpur, a physical notebook catches the artist’s eye and camera. Left behind by fellow refugees, its pages contain messages to future, unknown travellers: names, poetry and sketches of luxury items, including boats that live only in the makers’ imagination. Each segment becomes a testimonial annotation that resists anonymity, asserts presence, and reinforces the exhibition’s central gesture: to take note is to resist forgetting.
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[1] HOME 25 - Invisible Cities, Greater Dandenong City Council. https://www.greaterdandenong.vic.gov.au/home/home-2025-invisible-cities (accessed 04 August
2025, accessed 09 September 2025).
[2]HOME 25 featured artists include: Ali Afzali, Vernon Ah Kee, Rushdi Anwar, Atong Atem, Barat Ali Batoor, Belinda Farinaccia, Carla Gottgens, Emily Jacir, Soyoun Kim, Karo Moret Miranda, Kent Morris, Adrian Olguin, Maroulla Radisavic, Hayden Ryan, Ka Yan So, Joseph (Yugi) Williams.
[3]The Market Memoirs have been curated by Kyla Sun, Assistant Curator, Experience and Partnerships, Creative and Engaged City, Greater Dandenong City Council.
[4] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2016, p.13.
[5] Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture, Routledge, London 2000, p. 73.
[6] Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York,1972.
[7]This aligns with Donna Haraway’s theory of situated knowledge, which critiques the ‘god trick’ of disembodied objectivity towards accountable, embodied and partial perspectives. See: Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,’ Feminist Studies 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 589–90.
[8]Hip-hop Punjabi Cipher, 19 July 2025, Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre; Hakaya of Home, Drum Theatre, 5 July 2025; Reworlding Dandy, central Dandenong, 2, 16, 23 and 30 August 2025. For the full series of HOME 25 public program events see, https://www.greaterdandenong.vic.gov.au/home/home-2025-invisible-cities (accessed 04 August 2025).
[9]Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,’ Les Lèvres Nues no. 6 (1955), reprinted in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, 1981, pp. 5–8.[10]Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Zone Books, New York, 2008, p. 145.