Maki Ogawa is a Japanese–Australian artist based in Eora/Sydney. Working across drawing, painting, and more recently installation, her practice reflects on the ambiguous and shifting nature of bicultural identity. She explores how symbols and motifs - particularly ropes, rocks, and grids -can reveal the tensions and harmonies between cultural frameworks. Through these visual languages, Maki investigates sacred spaces, the role of language, and the interplay between Eastern and Western modes of thinking. Her work embraces hybridity as a generative space, using it to create new ways of understanding and to examine how we navigate, negotiate, and construct our identities.

Naveed Farro is an artist-filmmaker who examines how cultural histories are preserved, altered, or lost through displacement, drawing on his perspective as a second-generation Iranian-Australian. His practice employs new imaging technologies to reimagine material cultures and histories, particularly when access to artefacts is limited by conflict and political unrest. His most recent (and ongoinmg) project, The Palace, involves travelling to North Atlantic museums to scan and reproduce plaster cast copies of sculptures from Iranian antiquity at full scale, making them accessible to audiences in Narrm (Melbourne). Through these surrogates, Naveed seeks to restore or reframe histories that have been absent or obscured, while examining the politics of reproduction. He pursues this inquiry through a practice of research, filmmaking, sculpture, and installation.

Naveed's work is part of the State Library of Victoria collection, and he has presented solo exhibitions at MADA Gallery (2025), Bus Projects (2024), Kings Artist Run (2024), the Immigration Museum (2023), and A1 Bakery (2020). He is currently a recipient of the 2026 Expand Lab Moving Image Commission and is a Master of Fine Art graduate at Monash University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. He has worked as a Moving Image Designer at the National Gallery of Victoria and in post production at VICE Media. He teaches Film and Media Studies at Monash University.

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Keiran Molaeb is a queer Lebanese artist whose practice explores cultural, interpersonal and familial connections. His work seeks to honour memory and celebrate the rich diversity of his heritage, creating a visual language that pays tribute to the people, places and histories that shape his identity.

Working primarily in portraiture, Keiran approaches each painting as a kind of ‘family portrait'. His subjects are chosen with  care, selected for the significance they hold in his life, and rendered through a slow, deliberate process that becomes an act of dedication and love.

Rooted in storytelling, his practice explores the idea of ‘cultural roots’, reflecting on how connections stretch, intertwine and persist across borders. His paintings are created on Lebanese cedar and olive wood sourced from his father’s home country and prepared by hand by his grandfather. By grounding each work in this material lineage, Keiran wants to make ensure that every element (medium, subject and process) remains connected to the culture he commemorates and celebrates.

Thang Do is a queer Vietnamese-born artist based in Melbourne whose performances and installations explore humanity’s attraction to spectacle as a way to escape, hope and imagine new possibilities. Drawing on the tensions between Vietnam’s unresolved passages into modernity and the Western pursuit of the “Australian dream,” Thang’s work examines the emotional and cultural negotiations of migrant life.

Using domestic materials such as paper, foil and glitter, Thang creates embellished vessels and altar-like installations that merge spiritual symbolism with bureaucratic realities. Works including Department of 2nd Home Affairs highlight the anxieties and aspirations shaped by visa systems, cultural inheritance and social precarity. Through these hybrid forms, Thang invites viewers into a space where desire, identity and transformation co-exist.

Johanna van der Linden (she/her) is an artist living and working on unceded Wurundjeri country in Naarm. Her practice spans print making, metalwork, and sculpture, where she reinterprets traditional iconography through a contemporary lens. Johanna explores themes of embodiment, materiality, and the intersections between the body and the material world, engaging with feminist materialisms to examine the relationships between physicality and symbolism. Johanna holds a BA in Creative Arts/Education from Australian Catholic University, a first class Honours in Fine Arts from RMIT University, and a MFA in Sculpture from the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa.

Alexandra Kumala is a Jakarta-born filmmaker and writer whose work examines the complex layers and intricacies within Indonesian identity. Through film, sound and moving image, she works and plays with nontraditional forms - that excavate silences, explore the language of absence, and discover ways to articulate the many stories that are otherwise untranslatable and inexpressible. Drawing on her multicultural heritage and a life lived across continents, she uses symbolism, metaphor and allegory to examine shifting borders, histories and power. Her films and essays foreground marginalised voices and speak to anyone who has felt silenced, erased or caught between worlds.

Jacob Kotzee is a Perth-based artist whose painting practice explores the tension between legibility and ambiguity. Reworking film stills, media images and found photographs, Kotzee dissolves familiar motifs to question how national identities and cultural memories are constructed. His paintings suspend recognisable imagery into states of uncertainty, opening space for new interpretations of unresolved histories. Kotzee holds a BFA (Honours, First Class) from Curtin University and has exhibited in solo and group shows across Perth, with an upcoming residency at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Devika Bilimoria is a London-based artist raised in Naarm/Melbourne whose x-disciplinary practice spans performance, dance, video, photography, drawing and installation. Drawing from Bharatanatyam, Odissi, theatre and live art, their work explores queering, time and materiality through South Asian diasporic, queer and ecological perspectives.

They hold a BA from RMIT and First-Class Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts, where they received the Rodger Davies Award for their durational performance Offerings. Their work has been shown at the National Portrait Gallery, Museum of Australian Photography, Dancehouse and internationally, including the Whitechapel Gallery’s London Open Live.

Devika has undertaken residencies with Performance Space and Critical Path (Aus), AADK (Spain) and the Creative Body Institute (USA) and has recently been supported by Creative Australia.