Azza Zein: Tashabok

Exhibition was open from Tuesday 10 December 2024 - Friday 28 February 2025

Azza Zein’s Tashabok was a poignant and evolving exhibition that invited audiences to explore the complex stories of displacement, migration, and the unseen connections between objects, bodies, and labour. The exhibition drew from Zein’s group drawing sessions and conversations with artists and participants, revealing the hidden journeys of displaced objects.

Since 2020, Zein has used playful drawings and storytelling to uncover the secret lives of these items, tracing their paths across borders and environments. The exhibition highlighted the often-overlooked work behind living in unfamiliar places, while also examining the intersection of modern life and migrant experiences through a unique focus on decorative arts and everyday materials.

Born to a Syrian mother and a Lebanese father, Zein grew up in Beirut and now resides in Narrm/Melbourne. Her artistic practice reflects her heritage and her background in economics, using art as a way to rethink the value of materials, particularly those that have undergone migration. Through Tashabok, she brings attention to the unnoticed labour in today’s digital economy, offering new ways to consider the relationship between people, places, and the objects that accompany them.

This exhibition created a space for reflection on the broader theme of migration, not just of people, but of the materials and objects that shape our lives. Zein’s work is a reminder of the deep, often unseen stories that lie behind the things we use and the places we inhabit.

Exhibition Glossary

With each exhibition we will be including a glossary of terms for the community.

Counter-geography (or Counter Cartography)

Counter-geography (or counter cartography): a method that challenges the rigidity of maps by creating alternative mapping through collective narrative and participatory artistic practices, exposing the power of borders and the ways in which space is socially constructed.

Counter-mapping

Counter-mapping: the map-making process whereby communities appropriate the state's techniques of formal mapping and make their own maps as alternatives to those used by government (Nancy Peluso, 1995).

Displacement

Displacement: in the global context, the situation which results from persons or groups of persons being forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, either across an international border or within a State, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights, economic crisis or natural or human-made disasters.

Ficto-critical

Ficto-critical: blending fact and fiction, ethnographic observation, archival history, literary theory and memoir.

Mapping

Mapping: charting not just places or even abstract territories, but the ideas and concerns we attach to cartography itself.

Migrant materials or Materiality of Migration

Migrant materials or Materiality of Migration: recording journeys of forced and undocumented migration through objects, vessels, buildings, and landscapes.