BEYOND

Exhibition Review: Visual Arts | Brian Rope

BEYOND: An art tonic, making sense of this discombobulating time by Kati Gorgenyi, Toni Hassan, John Pratt, and Ujala Aftab

Chapel Gallery, Charles Sturt University | 7 – 23 May 2026

We read, hear and view true, distorted, opionated and fake news stories every day. We struggle to make sense of so much that reaches us via newspapers, radios, TV broadcasts, the diverse accounts on all the different social media platforms, and even in the views of family and friends. Are you distressed by the state of our world and the assault of saturating, doomsday news?

The four artists in this exhibition, Kati Gorgenyi, Toni Hassan, John Pratt, and Ujala Aftab, each grappled with what it meant for them to be living in the information age and to be perplexed by the speed of environmental and political change. They used diverse materials to address the complex issues.

Their joint project was conceived in 2024 with shared questions: 'How do we sit with what we are seeing and hearing?’ and ‘How might we move beyond grief?’’ Newspapers became a common material for them - referencing news and the notion of global legacy. The four artists found comfort in talking about ‘The News’ together and about different processes they were exploring and adopting. At that time, all four were Canberra-based. Hassan has since relocated to Adelaide but continued producing works for the show - and has taken a leading role pulling it all together.

 

John Pratt says that, for him, “overwhelmed is too strong a word, but we come into contact continuously with ‘The News’ as a field, pulled into a mode of distress. If you're empathetic to some of the things that are happening, it’s hard to contend with or accommodate.” His work seeks to juxtapose natural elements, digital codes and media as a way of exploring the impact of technology on the way we understand our place in the world.

 

Pratt has contributed woodcut and collage pieces.

John Pratt - Passage, woodcut and collage work, 2025.

Kati Gorgenyi says she found herself in long periods of avoidance, when she just could not bear seeing and hearing about the state of the world, destruction from all directions and the way people in power present themselves, and how the media reports. She then began playing with newspapers - altering the material, making sculptures, and painting with an encaustic medium. She recycled, reformed and reshaped the material seeking to create an alternative environment.

Gorgenyi’s contributions are wax, pigment and newspaper pieces plus an installation of pots, newspapers and bamboo constructions. Seeing a small and peaceful part the outside world through the window behind her installation was somehow incongruous.

Kati Gorgenyi - Beyond 3 – wax, pigment, newspaper, 2026

(installation shot – Brian Rope)

Kati Gorgenyi - Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow

- Installation: Pots, newspaper, bamboo, glue, 2026

Kati Gorgenyi - Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

(installation shot showing outside world behind – Brian Rope) 

Ujala Aftab is a watercolour and textile artist who has been working with pattern and repetition, embroidering on transfer prints of newspapers. On her Instagram account, she describes her artwork very simply as Experimental Embroidery Art.

Aftab is showing four mixed media pieces.

Ujala Aftab - Detail of Weariness – Mixed media: embroidery on canvas with acrylic and ink, 2024. 

Toni Hassan also speaks about the news. “It enters us, the drama, the conflict. It can change us, as stories do. I have, for some years, been thinking about ways to express the impacts and how art can help me make sense of human history over time. I wanted to go beyond doomsday narratives, to something perhaps richer. I’d also become increasingly intentional about reducing my news consumption, after being a journalist and opinion writer for many years. Drawing became an accessible way to make sense of things, begin to frame history and my place in it, and also meditate on the themes that surfaced. Rocks became a motif for the heaviness of the world and ancientness.”

Hassan contributes a range of coloured pencil on paper artworks. They are complex and need thorough exploration to maximise the impact each has on us, just as the barrage of news and commentary from both traditional and social media that surrounds us every day also impacts us.

Toni Hassan – The grief and sense of loss that I often attribute to a failure in my personality is actually a feeling of emptiness, where a beautiful and strange otherness should be encountered / A short history of alienation, pencil on paper, 2024

Top: Too much to chew (information without integration frustrates wisdom) – pencil on paper, 2026

Bottom: The woman who ate too much news – pencil on paper, 2026

(Installation shot by Brian Rope of two works by Toni Hassan)

This is an exhibition well worth visiting to thoroughly explore the messages conveyed.

This review is also available on the author's blog.

Exhibition Review: Multimedia | Brian Rope

Trust Me | Toni Hassan

Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Manuka | 24 April – 5 May 2024 (Inclusive of Anzac Day, excluding Mon April 29).

Have you ever wondered what having cancer means? I’ve always thought it would not be possible to know before actually experiencing it. Much is revealed by this moving, multi-media examination of the personal and collective geography of Kamberri/Canberra-based artist Toni Hassan's transformative experience of receiving a cancer diagnosis and treatment in 2023.

Grateful for her cancer remission, Hassan is showcasing artwork inspired by the experience. She uses textiles made from repurposed materials, photographs, video work, paintings, and found-object installations to highlight surreal, psychological, spiritual and physical aspects of her journey, plus the visual culture of medical care. She has done so to reconcile her personal experiences with taboos surrounding cancer in the context of public health. 

This social practice visual artist is a practising Christian, deep thinker, Walkley Award-winning writer and broadcaster, and an adjunct research fellow with the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture. She has always been interested in ideas around living well in the spirit, body and mind and has explored the nature of reality. So, it is not surprising that she decided to view her cancer as a visitor or visitant, a physical thing offering a spiritual dimension. Reflecting on this exhibition, Hassan has written that she drew on the writings of Richard Rohr, an American Franciscan priest and writer on spirituality, to find inspiration for practicing defiant joy.

The show’s name reflects the fact that Hassan’s treatment over nine months was a prolonged test of trust in the professionals at Canberra Hospital, trust in known evidence or science, trust in her family to care for her. And trust in what she refers to as “the divine Ground of Being which my illness drew me closer to.”

The room sheet leads visitors clockwise around the room then into its centre. There are acrylics on board, and photographs printed on Hahnemühle rag. The photos are about the hospital setting. Entrance 2023 shows the coldness of the entrance to the Canberra Region Cancer Centre.

Entrance, 2023 - Archival pigment on Hahnemühle photo rag, 53.5 x 63.5 cm. Artist Proof, Unframed.

And there are a variety of other works, including disposable nursing pads embellished with thread, a steel bed base loaded with rocks (and a pillow), and 24 patient identification bands stitched together. The rocks effectively convey how hard it was to lie on a bed receiving chemotherapy for hours at a time, again and again.

Hassan has always been interested in ideas around living well in the spirit, body and mind and has explored the nature of reality. For her, cancer provided the bonus of seeing the body in new ways. Tender is a moving self-portrait about tenderness for what is seen and unseen. 

Tender, 2024 – Acrylic on board. 31 x 31cm

On a trolley, a stereo channel video reveals MRI images of the inside of parts of the artist’s body. The X-ray scans and MRIs provided the artist with a fresh perspective on her physiology. Below the video sits an enteral syringe and band (designed for delivering nutrients and medication directly into the gastrointestinal tract). The area around Hassan’s PEG - the gastro tube directly into her stomach developed an infection, causing prolonged and acute stabbing pain. This exhibit conveys a strong message.

There are two quite wonderful exhibits using hospital gowns – neither readily recognisable as such. Vul-ner-able, 2024 is transformed with fabric and thread, Care economy, 2024 embellished with sequins and vibrant colour. 

Care economy, 2024 (Reclaimed hospital chemo and disposable nursing gowns, and sequins) -
Photo by Caleb Thorson

On the exhibit Care Moment, 2024 Recycled Table there is house paint and pencil, ceramic bowl, mats made of disposable medical plastic tongs, and sugar-coated chocolate buttons. We read instructions which invite us to delight in one of the chocolates, using it to remember someone who cared for us and give thanks, then to write about or draw it.

A late addition to the show has a title which makes a profound statement - I’m still here. Hassan is indeed still here. In remission she knows she will have more time, more adventures, more projects. We can rejoice with her and look forward to more artworks and exhibitions from this artist.

This review is also available on the author's blog here.

Between Presumption and Melancholy, Huon, The Grand Scheme

Brian Rope | Photography, Videography

Between Presumption and Melancholy | Toni Hassan

Huon | Noah Thompson

The Grand Scheme | Chris Round

Photo Access | 27 Apr – 10 Jun

These three exhibitions set out to explore environment and climate threats - two by looking at physical changes made by humans and the third at impacts on particular people.

Toni Hassan is a social practice visual artist, Walkley Award-winning journalist, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture. Between Presumption and Melancholy shows three multimedia artworks from her video series Body and Breath: Remembering Black Summer, 2021-23.

Three women share personal experiences of Australia’s Black Summer of 2019-20. Against the background of an Australian flag in a smoke-free azure sky, Rhian Williams, a volunteer firefighter takes us right into those times of fear. The visual is projected on a translucent curtain that moves such that the flag ripples.

Toni-Hassan, Video still, 2021, Body and Breath-Remembering-Black Summer - 1

Moving water and moving plane propellors are backgrounds as Sarah Bachelard, a Canberra-based priest and theologian speaks “It was supposed to be Epiphany, … coming of the light….We actually changed the hymn we were going to sing, which was ‘Here in this place a new light is shining’ because, it was just, how could you sing that?”

Toni-Hassan, Video still, 2021, Body and Breath-Remembering-Black Summer - 2

Luminous and liquid light circles draw us in as Tess Horwitz, the late Canberra artist who created the Bushfire memorial at Mt Stromlo, speaks of "a journey from painful memory and the reality of the day of the fire” and “strength of community and shared experience and on to a very gradual sense of healing and regeneration." We share in her dream. 

Toni-Hassan, Video still, 2021, Body and Breath-Remembering-Black Summer - 3

How should we respond emotionally? Have we had a cathartic experience? Have we engaged our own grief regarding environmental changes? Hassan also has a book that includes transcripts of these three plus a further ten interviews.

Noah Thompson seeks to shed light on the continuing conflict between environmental preservation and industrial development in Huon. His large high quality framed inkjet prints are mostly untitled. He has taken inspiration from the destruction of the 2500-year-old Lea Tree – by supporters of the Gordon-below-Franklin project in 1989.

The images are intended to explore continuing tensions between conservation and development. Some are more successful than others. An image of the Lea Tree showing its vandals photographed before their “Fuck You Green Cunts” message painted on the tree’s still burning remains is powerful. Mt Lyell, 2020 presents a severe and disturbing reminder of that mine’s impact.

Noah Thompson, Mt Lyell, 2020

Chris Round has documented The Grand Scheme – the Snowy Hydro. His inkjet prints, also large and high quality, are images taken during the period 2016-2022. They do not include anything from the years before or during construction. They do provide clear evidence as to why he is an award-winning landscape photographer. Round has a book of these and other images available for purchase. 

Chris Round, Intake Tower, 2017

Round has expressed some opinions about hydroelectricity, both positive and negative, and argues for a balanced approach. He has “not tried to politicise environmental energy issues” and wonders whether his “approach might be too sedate”. He describes it as aiming to capture captivating and intriguing images and suggests that passing judgement would risk stifling conversations. I am not convinced and confess disappointment with the content of the works displayed.

Having first visited the Scheme and the area in 1958 and many times since, did I unfairly expect more? During the exhibition opening, a comment was made that it was refreshing to see straight photography on the gallery walls. Whilst, perhaps, it has become less common to see such works at this venue, I would question why that is necessarily “refreshing”. More contemporary artworks would have challenged me and stimulated greater consideration of the important issues these three shows were meant to present to us.

This review was first published by The Canberra Times on 13/5/23 - on page 10 of Panorama and online here. It is also available on the author's blog here.