Recently Noname posted a tweet saying she felt much happier once she stopped centring her experience around whiteness. Each cut to the skin is a new unearthing of the same dread; each expression of joy is a salve, despite it.

I am currently reading the catalogue for ‘Enough / Khalas: Contemporary Australian Muslim Artists’ an exhibition from 2018, curated on Gadigal land by Nur Shkembi and Phillip George at UNSW Galleries.

“The power of whiteness is in part established through the way stories of Australian multiculturalism are framed, reworked and retold; or, in other words, how the national space-time is imagined and narrated. Whiteness is conceived as a sense of entitlement to control the public space-time through the deployment of administrative technologies that produce temporalities of waiting, holding (detention), delay and withdrawal as non-white subjects negotiate their ways through the rules.”
- (Čvoro, 2018)[1]

Having been born Muslim heavily influences the lens through which I recount personal narratives. It informs my perspective, my rituals, my hopes, and expectations of self. Whether or not I know how to believe or appropriately participate, the cultural experience of overcoming the hegemony of Western imperialism seems potent and communally felt, through to the ends of my fingertips. That is to say, it is at the centre, for me, and any centralisation of experience is at the homogenising expense of all others. It’s not about God, though perhaps His omnipotence is an added bonus. 

“This morning I picked up a moth with a broken wing at the train station on the way to work. It stayed with me on the train, and until about a half hour into my shift, crawling up my arm to rest on my red scarf, in the crook of my neck and shoulder. Eventually it began rapidly fluttering its wings in preparation for flight, and then it was gone. I like to believe it's my maternal great grandma saying hullo, and encouraging me to be me.” - [2]

I don’t believe that it was Him that sent that moth down, struck down from the air and incapacitated on the pathway to Meltham Train Station. The one I picked up in hopes of moving it away from the thoroughfare. Because it felt like the right thing to do in that moment. It obviously wasn't dead as its grasp would have loosened from the asphalt and tumbled away in the wind–I didn’t want it to get stepped on. I believe it was some sort of manifestation of my maternal great-grandmother. The one who, according to my mum, always sensed future tidings, bad omens, and from what my gut tells me, she talked a lot of shit (and I mean in a way that I imagine I would admire and relate to). Talking shit in the face of judgement, doing what you want to do anyway, smoking durries until the day you die as a very old woman.

“There are numerous questions that arise when considering the politicisation of the Muslim figure in contemporary society. For example, should one deliberately choose to engage in the orientalising narrative, whether that be to educate, illuminate, challenge or subvert it? Or, should one simply go on, business as usual, and if so, what does business as usual even look like?” 
- (Shkembi, 2019) [3]

The white man with a gun was sentenced to life in prison without parole, and I feel myself wondering if the incarceration of a symbol of the violence of white supremacy will ever be a solution. Given that cops in so-called Australia kill young Muslim men all the time[4]. But I do find comfort in knowing some of these families experienced closure with this man’s prosecution. Fifty-one people died, forty fatally injured. 

Inna lilla wa inna lilla hiraji'un.

I toy with the idea that it was fear that drove a thick wedge between me and communal prayer, not choice. I grew up going to thornlie mosque and I have a distinct memory of scungy ablution basins, haphazardous pavers pushed into peaks by tree roots and overgrown grass spilling out under the suburban patio – with little to no memory of the interior prayer rooms. These disparate pieces of ethnic migrant suburbia, that form such a peacefully-chaotic mental image, are the pieces of built environment that I find myself very attached to.

”On the news, they burn the flag. The men scream, their faces orange, as the American flag, then the Israeli one, are set aflame. The flag is held until the last minute and then it is dropped. They yell, ‘God is the greatest,’ and she wonders who buys the flag, who provides the matches, is it the same person setting it alight? They protest, this or that, and she asks her father about these people: who are they, do they have jobs, do they have families? Why a flag, why not a photograph, an effigy, a petroleum-soaked figurine? Why a burning, why not a trampling or a stoning or a shooting?

            He does not respond but he changes the channel and leaves her to watch a cartoon.
            Why the burning? Why not the heft of a stone thrown cleanly, aimed at an invisible devil, the corrupt, the powerful people making big decisions in little offices far from where a protest can be heard?
- (Kassab, 2019) [5]

When I was sixteen, a car parked outside Thornlie Mosque was fire-bombed; ‘fuck Islam’ was sprawled across its front limestone wall. When I was six, a year after I had moved to boorloo from basel, a bullet was shot through a window at Mirrabooka Mosque. When I was eighteen, the year I moved out of my mother’s home, Mirrabooka Mosque was firebombed using improvised explosives. When I was ten, three bullets were shot through the domed roof of Queens Park Mosque. When I was fifteen a pig’s head was dumped in the bathroom of a prayer room at the University of Western Australia. And when I was nineteen, fifty-one people were murdered at the hands of a white supremacist, at Al Noor Mosque in Aotearoa. Naturally, the vigil held in memoriam, here in boorloo, was overtaken by emotional white people who sought to turn this moment into a ‘protest’, without the consent of the community. The Northbridge mosque was flooded with bouquets of sympathy flowers in the weeks that followed. 

(It’s not new,
                      and it is never far away.)

I wrote a poem about the feelings surrounding this event, and displayed it on the wall of a perth cultural centre residency space. While I wasn’t in the room, a visitor hurriedly scratched out ‘Allah’ with a drying biro - and defaced the rest of my displayed work. Kids, probably. This small incident spoke multitudes of the carelessness of arts organisations wishing to platform ‘underrepresented’ artists without first accepting the responsibility of mitigating any violence that they will inevitably face. This is not even to speak of the epistemic violence enacted by archival institutions – patronising censorship guised as community concern[6]. As my friend Marziya Mohamedali likes to self-proclaim, I am in a sense, a diversity poster-child that some wish to collect and display on a white-white wall. Which would be fine, as an exhibitionist, if not for all the racist bullshit I didn’t consent to copping while on display. It doesn’t take much to rustle such feathers, all I have to do is tell my story.

About the white man with a gun

Inna lilla wa inna lilla hirajiun
We belong to Allah and to Them we shall return

My people keep dying I think
When I know I’ll never know who my people really are 

And still, I move in and out of comfort of knowing where the home is
Where the heart is, I think that’s what you’re meant to think?
But I don’t know where that is
Right here? Being present in this brown body? Is this home?

At Madrasah, we were taught that Allah valued those that did not fear death and did not idolise those that did not deserve that power.

My teacher patiently read prayers to me, 
Practising them with me
sound by sound with transliterated characters I could understand 
(I’ve forgotten them all now)
This woman,
was so patient with my mindless ambiguity and my lack of understanding for the rituals and teachings that I was born into.
I didn’t understand then, what I understand now
Cultural rituals as an outlet for an understanding of self and those you love
Are more valuable 
than a racist manifesto 
written by a white man with a gun.

Patience never mattered, being a good Muslim for the white man never mattered. 
Effectively performing exoticisms of culture never mattered
Taking my shoes off at the door
Inheriting my mother’s accent
Reading the Qur’an in Arabic
Removing a rarely worn hijab
eating curry with my hands - - - -
Because he’ll kill us anyway

Being present in this brown body is a home, and so too was the defiance of my teacher closing the veil of her niqab when the white man walked into the room. 
Deftly lifting it back up once he left, and returning to the lesson.

Don’t be patient for him, don’t let him waste your time. Be your most messy Muslim migrant self.

I never got to Qur’an studies - but 
I did learn
fuck fearing death and 
fuck white supremacy.

Pilgrimage

The word ‘pilgrimage’ lends itself heavily to a religious context, especially as a Muslim with familial expectations to journey to Mecca at least once in their lifetime, and the unwavering expectation that this is what one wants when they visualise ‘pilgrimage’.

I like to make work (sometimes) by using materials that physically affect my body (temporarily), and the (often public) environments that they transition between (disruption) – as a means of self-defining ways of enacting ‘pilgrimage’. Lifting heavy things over long distances for art forced me to reckon with asking people close to me for help, allowing them to prove to me that they want to help (post-trauma), no matter how abstract the barriers present themselves. I consider pilgrimage in relation to reconciling temporal loss and gain of strength as a queer person, a genderless faggot between revolutions, and a second-generation migrant currently without access to oral histories beyond those I create[8]. I’m but a person sharing ‘next-generation’ histories. An imagined migrant future![9]  I am reminded of a collection of words Djab Wurrung Embassy posted on Instagram.[10]

                                   "White supremacy is just as deeply ingrained as intergenerational trauma. The     
                                    oppressed become the oppressors and racism goes well beyond a crooked word.
                                    That’s the way it is." 

A close-up image of a handwritten note on lined paper: 

BE A GOOD ANCESTOR.

"I jumped back and forth between ideas – at one stage I jokingly suggested I carry one brick at a time from Canning Vale to Bassendean for the duration of my residency. [redacted name], following on with the tone of the conversation, they pointed out that this sounded like a pilgrimage. That word, the connotations attached to it, and a consideration of that process defined by my own means, has stuck with me since. It was like a tiny lightbulb in my head. ~ping" - [11]

(There is vulnerability in exploring and disseminating histories – that perhaps I don’t fully understand. 

Even with confirmed connection to these histories via family and heritage and ancestry. 
Histories, nonetheless, that I don’t have full access to…

whether that be because of trauma, familial separation, death, detention or systematic erasure of aforementioned histories…)

There’s something very masochistic about pilgrimage that embodies a deep place of yearned catharsis. I’ve reused these bricks a lot for different performative purposes, even after the house from which they came got sold on. The emotional pain of what they symbolised has, to some degree, been felt and purged in the physical pain I felt carrying them up and down stairs, or across lengths of public transit. The physical pain felt really, really good. A playful euphoria began to glimmer on the horizon of a very gritty outlook. It took some very loving freaks to make me realise that self-induced experiences of pain don’t always equate to self-harm, or even harm unto others. 

"[...] without my chosen family, I really am alone. [...] There is a strength in vulnerability. [...] it’s such a fleeting thing that I struggle to grasp onto sometimes – often it means I’m building my walls faster than I’m dismantling them.

[...] 

[...] artist Gordan Hall (thank you Lillian for showing me this writer) published a reflection on a performance they did [about making work with heavy objects], and it is something I keep revisiting and rereading – this piece gave me an anchoring point, perhaps. I realised that I needed help." - [12]

The body keeps a record (from when I broke three bones in my left hand)

“The body keeps a record”
A friend iterates this expression in conversation, one which regarded learning about my experience and my body through pilgrimage and pain.

(many poems.
I keep writing, a small audience listens as I read
Seated side by side, on a train from Boorloo to Walyalup)

A small audience of dirty bricks, lifted by a broken hand
I feel the dimples of these fractures, my fingers curling forward
Ring finger dexterity stuck within the confines of a broken knuckle
Outstretched thumb

                    (a dyke’s ring finger).

I focus closely on the sensation of being broken
I focus closely on exacerbation.

. . .

A body-weighted step onto my hand, pieces spreading 
Further crushing
Remnants of structure

I inhale deeply, 

. . .

Induced vomit
Spitting salivations rolling from the back of my tongue

Taste reiteration of a meal already had.

[1] Uroš Čvoro, Time of Khalas, 2018, UNSW Galleries, Gadigal Eora Country (so-called Sydney)
[2] Writer’s note: From my journal, I also posted this on Instagram, I like to use social media as an archive, memory isn’t so good these days because of extended periods of hypoarousal (and other stuff).
[3] Nur Shkembi, Post Nine Eleven, 2019, un. Magazine 13.1, Naarm, Wurundjeri Kulin Country (so-called Melbourne)
[4] “Counter-terrorism” measures render the Muslim community victims of terrorism: both the terrorism of constant police intimidation, and the terrorism of anti-Muslim vigilantes like the Christchurch killer. Priya De, Police intimidation and media scapegoating behind the Brisbane killing, 2020
[5] Yumna Kassab, House of Youssef: Burning the Flag, 2019, Giramondo Publishing Company, Dharug Eora Country (so-called Western Sydney)
[6] Writer’s note: My contribution to this particular exhibition was a 45 minute documented performance, Donation to the Archives, in which I repeatedly dressed and undressed myself in the centre of Perth Cultural Centre. They did not like that...! 
[7] Gordon Hall, On Vulnerability & Heavy Objects, 2017, The Chart
[8] Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, 1977
[9] Imagined Migrant Futures: Seasons, Histories, Hopes, 2019, exhibition on Whadjuk Noongar Bibbulmun Country (so-called perth) curated by Steven James Finch and Gabby Loo.
[10] Djab Wurrung Heritage Protection Embassy is a blockade protecting sacred birthing trees from destruction on Djab Wurrung Country. To learn more - - > https://dwembassy.com/why-we-are-here/ and to donate - - > https://chuffed.org/project/djab-wurrung-protectors-fund https://www.instagram.com/p/CJue3iAH-TL
[11] Aisyah Aaqil Sumito, A Place to Reckon (invitation to participate), 2018, performative invitational text written for A Place to Reckon at (now defunct) Another Project Space
[12] Aisyah Aaqil Sumito, A Place to Reckon (invitation to participate), 2018, performative invitational text written for A Place to Reckon at (now defunct) Another Project Space

Recently Noname posted a tweet saying she felt much happier once she stopped centring her experience around whiteness. Each cut to the skin is a new unearthing of the same dread; each expression of joy is a salve, despite it.

I am currently reading the catalogue for ‘Enough / Khalas: Contemporary Australian Muslim Artists’ an exhibition from 2018, curated on Gadigal land by Nur Shkembi and Phillip George at UNSW Galleries.

“The power of whiteness is in part established through the way stories of Australian multiculturalism are framed, reworked and retold; or, in other words, how the national space-time is imagined and narrated. Whiteness is conceived as a sense of entitlement to control the public space-time through the deployment of administrative technologies that produce temporalities of waiting, holding (detention), delay and withdrawal as non-white subjects negotiate their ways through the rules.”
- (Čvoro, 2018)[1]

Having been born Muslim heavily influences the lens through which I recount personal narratives. It informs my perspective, my rituals, my hopes, and expectations of self. Whether or not I know how to believe or appropriately participate, the cultural experience of overcoming the hegemony of Western imperialism seems potent and communally felt, through to the ends of my fingertips. That is to say, it is at the centre, for me, and any centralisation of experience is at the homogenising expense of all others. It’s not about God, though perhaps His omnipotence is an added bonus. 

“This morning I picked up a moth with a broken wing at the train station on the way to work. It stayed with me on the train, and until about a half hour into my shift, crawling up my arm to rest on my red scarf, in the crook of my neck and shoulder. Eventually it began rapidly fluttering its wings in preparation for flight, and then it was gone. I like to believe it's my maternal great grandma saying hullo, and encouraging me to be me.” - [2]

I don’t believe that it was Him that sent that moth down, struck down from the air and incapacitated on the pathway to Meltham Train Station. The one I picked up in hopes of moving it away from the thoroughfare. Because it felt like the right thing to do in that moment. It obviously wasn't dead as its grasp would have loosened from the asphalt and tumbled away in the wind–I didn’t want it to get stepped on. I believe it was some sort of manifestation of my maternal great-grandmother. The one who, according to my mum, always sensed future tidings, bad omens, and from what my gut tells me, she talked a lot of shit (and I mean in a way that I imagine I would admire and relate to). Talking shit in the face of judgement, doing what you want to do anyway, smoking durries until the day you die as a very old woman.

“There are numerous questions that arise when considering the politicisation of the Muslim figure in contemporary society. For example, should one deliberately choose to engage in the orientalising narrative, whether that be to educate, illuminate, challenge or subvert it? Or, should one simply go on, business as usual, and if so, what does business as usual even look like?” 
- (Shkembi, 2019) [3]

The white man with a gun was sentenced to life in prison without parole, and I feel myself wondering if the incarceration of a symbol of the violence of white supremacy will ever be a solution. Given that cops in so-called Australia kill young Muslim men all the time[4]. But I do find comfort in knowing some of these families experienced closure with this man’s prosecution. Fifty-one people died, forty fatally injured. 

Inna lilla wa inna lilla hiraji'un.

I toy with the idea that it was fear that drove a thick wedge between me and communal prayer, not choice. I grew up going to thornlie mosque and I have a distinct memory of scungy ablution basins, haphazardous pavers pushed into peaks by tree roots and overgrown grass spilling out under the suburban patio – with little to no memory of the interior prayer rooms. These disparate pieces of ethnic migrant suburbia, that form such a peacefully-chaotic mental image, are the pieces of built environment that I find myself very attached to.

”On the news, they burn the flag. The men scream, their faces orange, as the American flag, then the Israeli one, are set aflame. The flag is held until the last minute and then it is dropped. They yell, ‘God is the greatest,’ and she wonders who buys the flag, who provides the matches, is it the same person setting it alight? They protest, this or that, and she asks her father about these people: who are they, do they have jobs, do they have families? Why a flag, why not a photograph, an effigy, a petroleum-soaked figurine? Why a burning, why not a trampling or a stoning or a shooting?

            He does not respond but he changes the channel and leaves her to watch a cartoon.
            Why the burning? Why not the heft of a stone thrown cleanly, aimed at an invisible devil, the corrupt, the powerful people making big decisions in little offices far from where a protest can be heard?
- (Kassab, 2019) [5]

When I was sixteen, a car parked outside Thornlie Mosque was fire-bombed; ‘fuck Islam’ was sprawled across its front limestone wall. When I was six, a year after I had moved to boorloo from basel, a bullet was shot through a window at Mirrabooka Mosque. When I was eighteen, the year I moved out of my mother’s home, Mirrabooka Mosque was firebombed using improvised explosives. When I was ten, three bullets were shot through the domed roof of Queens Park Mosque. When I was fifteen a pig’s head was dumped in the bathroom of a prayer room at the University of Western Australia. And when I was nineteen, fifty-one people were murdered at the hands of a white supremacist, at Al Noor Mosque in Aotearoa. Naturally, the vigil held in memoriam, here in boorloo, was overtaken by emotional white people who sought to turn this moment into a ‘protest’, without the consent of the community. The Northbridge mosque was flooded with bouquets of sympathy flowers in the weeks that followed. 

(It’s not new,
                      and it is never far away.)

I wrote a poem about the feelings surrounding this event, and displayed it on the wall of a perth cultural centre residency space. While I wasn’t in the room, a visitor hurriedly scratched out ‘Allah’ with a drying biro - and defaced the rest of my displayed work. Kids, probably. This small incident spoke multitudes of the carelessness of arts organisations wishing to platform ‘underrepresented’ artists without first accepting the responsibility of mitigating any violence that they will inevitably face. This is not even to speak of the epistemic violence enacted by archival institutions – patronising censorship guised as community concern[6]. As my friend Marziya Mohamedali likes to self-proclaim, I am in a sense, a diversity poster-child that some wish to collect and display on a white-white wall. Which would be fine, as an exhibitionist, if not for all the racist bullshit I didn’t consent to copping while on display. It doesn’t take much to rustle such feathers, all I have to do is tell my story.

About the white man with a gun

Inna lilla wa inna lilla hirajiun
We belong to Allah and to Them we shall return

My people keep dying I think
When I know I’ll never know who my people really are 

And still, I move in and out of comfort of knowing where the home is
Where the heart is, I think that’s what you’re meant to think?
But I don’t know where that is
Right here? Being present in this brown body? Is this home?

At Madrasah, we were taught that Allah valued those that did not fear death and did not idolise those that did not deserve that power.

My teacher patiently read prayers to me, 
Practising them with me
sound by sound with transliterated characters I could understand 
(I’ve forgotten them all now)
This woman,
was so patient with my mindless ambiguity and my lack of understanding for the rituals and teachings that I was born into.
I didn’t understand then, what I understand now
Cultural rituals as an outlet for an understanding of self and those you love
Are more valuable 
than a racist manifesto 
written by a white man with a gun.

Patience never mattered, being a good Muslim for the white man never mattered. 
Effectively performing exoticisms of culture never mattered
Taking my shoes off at the door
Inheriting my mother’s accent
Reading the Qur’an in Arabic
Removing a rarely worn hijab
eating curry with my hands - - - -
Because he’ll kill us anyway

Being present in this brown body is a home, and so too was the defiance of my teacher closing the veil of her niqab when the white man walked into the room. 
Deftly lifting it back up once he left, and returning to the lesson.

Don’t be patient for him, don’t let him waste your time. Be your most messy Muslim migrant self.

I never got to Qur’an studies - but 
I did learn
fuck fearing death and 
fuck white supremacy.

Pilgrimage

The word ‘pilgrimage’ lends itself heavily to a religious context, especially as a Muslim with familial expectations to journey to Mecca at least once in their lifetime, and the unwavering expectation that this is what one wants when they visualise ‘pilgrimage’.

I like to make work (sometimes) by using materials that physically affect my body (temporarily), and the (often public) environments that they transition between (disruption) – as a means of self-defining ways of enacting ‘pilgrimage’. Lifting heavy things over long distances for art forced me to reckon with asking people close to me for help, allowing them to prove to me that they want to help (post-trauma), no matter how abstract the barriers present themselves. I consider pilgrimage in relation to reconciling temporal loss and gain of strength as a queer person, a genderless faggot between revolutions, and a second-generation migrant currently without access to oral histories beyond those I create[8]. I’m but a person sharing ‘next-generation’ histories. An imagined migrant future![9]  I am reminded of a collection of words Djab Wurrung Embassy posted on Instagram.[10]

                                   "White supremacy is just as deeply ingrained as intergenerational trauma. The     
                                    oppressed become the oppressors and racism goes well beyond a crooked word.
                                    That’s the way it is." 

A close-up image of a handwritten note on lined paper: 

BE A GOOD ANCESTOR.

"I jumped back and forth between ideas – at one stage I jokingly suggested I carry one brick at a time from Canning Vale to Bassendean for the duration of my residency. [redacted name], following on with the tone of the conversation, they pointed out that this sounded like a pilgrimage. That word, the connotations attached to it, and a consideration of that process defined by my own means, has stuck with me since. It was like a tiny lightbulb in my head. ~ping" - [11]

(There is vulnerability in exploring and disseminating histories – that perhaps I don’t fully understand. 

Even with confirmed connection to these histories via family and heritage and ancestry. 
Histories, nonetheless, that I don’t have full access to…

whether that be because of trauma, familial separation, death, detention or systematic erasure of aforementioned histories…)

There’s something very masochistic about pilgrimage that embodies a deep place of yearned catharsis. I’ve reused these bricks a lot for different performative purposes, even after the house from which they came got sold on. The emotional pain of what they symbolised has, to some degree, been felt and purged in the physical pain I felt carrying them up and down stairs, or across lengths of public transit. The physical pain felt really, really good. A playful euphoria began to glimmer on the horizon of a very gritty outlook. It took some very loving freaks to make me realise that self-induced experiences of pain don’t always equate to self-harm, or even harm unto others. 

"[...] without my chosen family, I really am alone. [...] There is a strength in vulnerability. [...] it’s such a fleeting thing that I struggle to grasp onto sometimes – often it means I’m building my walls faster than I’m dismantling them.

[...] 

[...] artist Gordan Hall (thank you Lillian for showing me this writer) published a reflection on a performance they did [about making work with heavy objects], and it is something I keep revisiting and rereading – this piece gave me an anchoring point, perhaps. I realised that I needed help." - [12]

The body keeps a record (from when I broke three bones in my left hand)

“The body keeps a record”
A friend iterates this expression in conversation, one which regarded learning about my experience and my body through pilgrimage and pain.

(many poems.
I keep writing, a small audience listens as I read
Seated side by side, on a train from Boorloo to Walyalup)

A small audience of dirty bricks, lifted by a broken hand
I feel the dimples of these fractures, my fingers curling forward
Ring finger dexterity stuck within the confines of a broken knuckle
Outstretched thumb

                    (a dyke’s ring finger).

I focus closely on the sensation of being broken
I focus closely on exacerbation.

. . .

A body-weighted step onto my hand, pieces spreading 
Further crushing
Remnants of structure

I inhale deeply, 

. . .

Induced vomit
Spitting salivations rolling from the back of my tongue

Taste reiteration of a meal already had.

[1] Uroš Čvoro, Time of Khalas, 2018, UNSW Galleries, Gadigal Eora Country (so-called Sydney)
[2] Writer’s note: From my journal, I also posted this on Instagram, I like to use social media as an archive, memory isn’t so good these days because of extended periods of hypoarousal (and other stuff).
[3] Nur Shkembi, Post Nine Eleven, 2019, un. Magazine 13.1, Naarm, Wurundjeri Kulin Country (so-called Melbourne)
[4] “Counter-terrorism” measures render the Muslim community victims of terrorism: both the terrorism of constant police intimidation, and the terrorism of anti-Muslim vigilantes like the Christchurch killer. Priya De, Police intimidation and media scapegoating behind the Brisbane killing, 2020
[5] Yumna Kassab, House of Youssef: Burning the Flag, 2019, Giramondo Publishing Company, Dharug Eora Country (so-called Western Sydney)
[6] Writer’s note: My contribution to this particular exhibition was a 45 minute documented performance, Donation to the Archives, in which I repeatedly dressed and undressed myself in the centre of Perth Cultural Centre. They did not like that...! 
[7] Gordon Hall, On Vulnerability & Heavy Objects, 2017, The Chart
[8] Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, 1977
[9] Imagined Migrant Futures: Seasons, Histories, Hopes, 2019, exhibition on Whadjuk Noongar Bibbulmun Country (so-called perth) curated by Steven James Finch and Gabby Loo.
[10] Djab Wurrung Heritage Protection Embassy is a blockade protecting sacred birthing trees from destruction on Djab Wurrung Country. To learn more - - > https://dwembassy.com/why-we-are-here/ and to donate - - > https://chuffed.org/project/djab-wurrung-protectors-fund https://www.instagram.com/p/CJue3iAH-TL
[11] Aisyah Aaqil Sumito, A Place to Reckon (invitation to participate), 2018, performative invitational text written for A Place to Reckon at (now defunct) Another Project Space
[12] Aisyah Aaqil Sumito, A Place to Reckon (invitation to participate), 2018, performative invitational text written for A Place to Reckon at (now defunct) Another Project Space