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Dharug/ Sydney - Karachi

COMING UP // Meet the Artists Behind ‘Transmedia Worldbuilding Residency Exhibition’

Join us tomorrow at 1pm for a conversation with the artists behind ‘Transmedia Worldbuilding Residency Exhibition’.

Featuring:
Myra Javaid (@_myrajav)
Sim Kaur (@s1mkaur)
Vidya Rajan (@vidyarrrr)
Sage Godrei (@seemoresage)

The artists will discuss the ideas, inspirations and creative processes behind their projects, spanning games, digital storytelling, personal archives, memory and speculative futures.

Before and after the talk, you're welcome to visit the exhibition at 4A LAB and experience a series of interactive works that bring together art, technology and cultural storytelling.

If you're interested in contemporary art, digital culture, games, storytelling or creative technology, this is a great opportunity to meet the artists and learn more about their work before the exhibition closes on 14 June.

In collaboration with Antariksha Studio and supported by Creative Australia (@creative.australia), this residency exhibition is presented at 4A LAB (@4a_aus), supporting South Asian Australian women and gender diverse artists working across art, technology and cultural storytelling.

We'd love to see you at 4A tomorrow ✨

Artist Talk
🗓 Sat 6 June, 1–2pm
📝 RSVP via link in bio 🔗 or trybooking.com/DMOJQ
🎟 Free entry

Exhibition
🗓 2 May – 14 June 2026
🕐 Wed–Sun, 11am–5pm
🎟 Free entry

#4acentre #4alab #sydneyartist #transmedia #sydneyart

Image credit: Photo of Sim Kaur, Sage Godrei, Vidya Rajan and Myra Javaid.

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$“In ‘Stain’ we see the body, identity, and myth as sites of negotiation and play; that what is marked, fractured, or stained can be generative. Survival and imagination demand fluidity and adaptability, the aswang asserts.” 🖋️Excerpt from ‘Stain as a mark, celebrated’ by Carielyn Tunion. Looking back at our recent exhibition ‘Stain’, this essay discusses the artists’ works through the lens of the awsang, a shapeshifting vampire-like being in Filipino folklore. The piece deep dives into the politics of visibility – “how the body is seen, shaped, surveilled, and mythologised”. Asserting the body as mutable and rebellious, Carielyn explores how the artworks reflect the aswang’s ethos of persistence, transformation, and power to resist containment. Read the full essay now via our link in bio 🔗 Carielyn Tunion (she/they) is a writer, videopoet and cultural worker with a background in film studies and grassroots community advocacy. She is interested in radical nostalgia, revolutionary romanticism and the Tropical Gothic. Her work explores themes of folklore, feminine monstrosity and yearning from a Filipino and Hong Kong diaspora perspective. @aswangnibbles 📷 Images: Slide 1 - Oliver Whitehouse ‘MYTH’, still from video work, courtesy of the artist Slide 2 - Michail Mathioudakis aka Marcia Manhunter, photo by David Suyasa Slide 3 - Exhibition view, photos by David Suyasa Slide 4 - (left to right) Lois Waters ‘Leech’ and ‘Dissolve’, Runa Vasile ‘Untitled. (Doughnutland)’, Fiona Lee ‘The Interruption’, photos by David Suyasa.$

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ANNOUNCED ARTISTS // Transmedia Worldbuilding Residency 2026 ✨

We are excited to introduce the five artists selected for this year’s Transmedia Worldbuilding Residency. This program by 4A LAB (@4a_aus) and Antariksha Studio (@antariksha.studio) supports South Asian Australian women and gender diverse artists working across art technology and cultural storytelling.

👋Meet the artists:

- Sage Godrei (@seemoresage), NSW
A multidisciplinary artist and writer exploring dream consciousness the Akashic field bio colonial histories and audience participation in transmedia interactive work.

- Vidya Rajan (@vidyarrrr) , VIC
Works across performance screen and digital media with interests in speculative narrative colonial legacies game design and emergent technology.

- Myra Javaid (@_myrajav), NSW
A visual artist and multimedia storyteller exploring South Asian cultural memory hybrid identity ecological reconciliation and intergenerational narratives.

- Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin (@pink_myth_of_hell), ACT
A queer activist artist and curator whose practice focuses on community rooted projects collective care grassroots storytelling and decolonial creative methods.

- Sim Kaur (@s1mkaur), NSW
A creative director working with movement based film drawing on film photography and spoken word to create warm visual worlds centred on women of colour and spiritual motifs.

🌏 What happens next

Over the next six months the artists will begin an online collaborative worldbuilding process and join a one week intensive at 4A LAB in April 2026. They will explore industry tools such as Unreal Engine, learn kinaesthetic and empathy based design approaches and work closely with mentors from India, Switzerland and Australia.

🎥 Presenting in 2026

- 4A LAB in Sydney
- 4A+ digital platform
- Eyemyth Festival in Mumbai

We look forward to seeing the worlds they will create.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia (@creative.australia), its principal arts investment and advisory body.

#4a #4alab #transmediaworldbuilding #artistresidency #asianart #southasiandiaspora #digitalartist #australianarts

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We're in the final week of 'Stain' exhibition 🖤 Come and be immersed in Myra Javaid's three-part painting series, 'Karachi Odyssey I' (2025), 'Karachi Odyssey II' (2024), 'Nowhere, Everywhere' (2017) ｡˚○

"My works are dreamscapes that embody the lived complexities and contradictions of growing up
as a woman in post-colonial Karachi – a city that continues to inhabit me no matter how far I go.

In Nowhere, everywhere, an earlier work, I attempted to capture a multitude of dissonances
between interior and exterior worlds: the safety of the inside versus the danger of the outside,
the fragility of intimacy against the threat of public spaces, the lure of internalised Western
notions of freedom, and the weight of cultural and religious patriarchal gazes. Through realism,
I sought to convey these contradictions of vulnerability and resilience all at once: suspended in space, with no grounding or resolution.

In contrast, the more recent series, Karachi odyssey reimagines memory as a heart-centered
reconciliation. These paintings weave together the female body, male-dominant streets, ecology,
night life, the working-class, and internalised religious codes – such as the Islamic angel of
judgment on each shoulder – into vibrant and playful harmonies. Where previously I leaned into
alienation and contrast, here, I attempt fluidity and connection.

This reconciliation is also linguistic. Having had a colonial education that stigmatised Urdu, my
mother tongue, I now return to it lovingly through line work inspired by the curvature of Urdu
letters; allowing language, body, culture, and taboo-exteriors to flow together into a love letter
to the city within me.

Painted on plastic bags, these works are malleable yet enduring, like a personal archive; holding
memory not as something to be resolved, but to be embraced and re-imagined."

Acrylics on plastic bags, framed digital painting on archival paper.
43x50cm, 45x37cm, 40x28cm

🛍 ♻ 🥤
@_myrajav

Open times: 12–4PM, Thu to Sun
Closing event: Sunday, 26th October

📸 Photos by David Suyasa @davidsuyasa

⚔️ Organised by Celine Cheung, Rainer Ciar, Carmen Mercedes Gago Schieb, Emma Harbridge

#Stain #Burramattagal

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Myra Javaid

@_myrajav