A welcome implies acceptance, without condition or restriction.

But Dharug artist Billy Bain took another while curating the show You’re Welcome? for Verge Gallery at The University of Sydney.

“The context for us right now as Aboriginal people is really volatile,” he says. “This came off the back of the Voice Referendum not going through.”

He speaks to the contradictions of the idea of a welcome and what it means to feel welcome in a country that still celebrates invasion and commemorates settlement of this land by force.

“I feel like I need to unconditionally welcome other people when even me being welcomed in Australia, is conditional on something,” he says. “It’s always on somebody else’s terms, even the idea of doing a Welcome to Country is because it’s policy.”

You’re Welcome? challenges, subverts and gently nudges the idea of what it means to be welcome in so-called Australia through the work of six early career and emerging, Sydney-based artists. Using self-portraiture in a non-traditional and figurative sense, these artists draw on painting, ceramics, printmaking, and digital 3D art to present their own political, humorous, and surreal takes on what it means to belong and how their identities inform the conditions of being welcome here.

Opening just before Invasion Day and running during the University of Sydney’s Welcome Week, Bain was aware of the context that the show would run in a university gallery.

“Welcome week is one of the buzziest times for exhibitions and with new students and a lot of multicultural students on campus, this is a really interesting time to discuss what it means to be welcome,” he says.  “I’m sure that not just me, but a lot of people in this country have different experiences of what that means.”

Bain hoped to position the show in way that is fun and engaging while also reflecting these more serious .

“It’s kind of an irony to have an exhibition that’s about being welcome [that] speaks about colonisation and different diasporas, and this idea of not being welcome, but then also framing it in a way with artists that have really, like poppy, fun and welcoming practices,” he adds. “I wanted to make it playful.”

The terms playful and whimsical could also apply to the visual language of artist Jacquie Meng who was commissioned to paint a mural in the gallery. Born in Hangzhou, China, Meng migrated to Australia with her parents when she was one.

Combining imagery from a different place and time through her own experiences of having grown up here and in China in her early years, Meng’s work revolves around the idea of maps and suburbia, and drawings of homes and trees—the earliest forms of placemaking for children—reminiscent of “those rugs everyone had as a kid with maps of the roads and the houses on them”.

“A lot of my work is kind of making invented maps or rituals that draw on culturally grounded imagery, ideas and aesthetics, but also mixes it with more post-internet, contemporary and personal lived experience interpretation of these things that are simultaneously familiar and close, but also really distant.”

“Communicating in this visual language that is childlike, colourful and storybook-like is a way in which I can digest these really hard topics of what is home, what is comfort, what is belonging and what is my identity in this landscape I grew up in, in Australia,” she adds.

The show brings together different perspectives on belonging in raw, honest and personal stories, like that of Kurdish artist Mostafa ‘Moz’ Azimitabar who arrived in 2013 seeking asylum and medical support in Australia. Instead, over the next eight years, he was detained on Manus Island and then imprisoned in a Melbourne hotel.

“I learned how to paint from suffering. I started painting with coffee and toothbrush as there was no art supplies, there was nothing to paint with.”

In the last decade, the offshore processing and detention of people seeking asylum has cost Australian taxpayers $12 billion.

Every few months Azimitabar has to prove his worthiness to stay in Australia only to receive a six-month visa wrapped in precarity, uncertainty, and the risk of deportation at any time. And yet the message of this two-time Archibald Prize finalist is love, which is the name of one of his works in the show and incidentally, the name of his upcoming solo show at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery, a first for a refugee artist in any Australian gallery.

Azimitabar was the first person Bain selected for the exhibition. “I needed to have him telling his story. Our stories don’t exist in an echo chamber or vacuum where they’re only speaking to themselves,” he adds. “It’s all about community for me, and it’s all about championing different stories.”

You’re Welcome?
Verge Gallery, USU
Until 28 March