Birrarung Lightboxes

Positioned along Southbank Promenade, on the banks of the Birrarung, six artists present work on lightboxes that tell stories of our relationship with water, ranging from Australian adolescence to the politics of water.

Naomi Hobson’s series Adolescent Wonderland tells the stories of young Aboriginal people living on the Coen River in Cape York Peninsula. Highlighting her subjects in vivid colour against greyscale backgrounds, Hobson plays on the dreamlike inner lives of teenagers everywhere. Worimi man Dean Cross takes us to his family farm on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country for his series of Polaroids, simultaneously intimate, nostalgic and inescapably political.

London-based, Hungarian-born Marton Perlaki’s idiosyncratic and playful portraits and still-lives invite audiences to interpret their visual clues; Patrick Pound repurposes found images, here focusing on human interaction with water; Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose explores post-apartheid South Africa through beach culture; and Melbourne-based duo The Huxleys explore the gender fluid nature of sea creatures in a playful reflection on identity constructions.

Commissioned by Photo Australia and the City of Melbourne