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West Space

@westspace

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Non-profit art space supporting timely art and artists.
𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩, 22 Aug → 24 Oct
Open Wed to Fri 11am → 6pm, Sat 12 → 4pm

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Artist symposiums, live music, still life club, and more this week at Collingwood Yards.

Find out more via
@composite_moving_image
@thesocialstudio
@westspace
@liquid_architecture
@runnerup.rooftop
@veasvisuals
@apy_ac_collective
@artsprojectaust

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Coming Up: West Space is hosting an artist symposium to close out the current exhibition, language to reach with. The afternoon will feature artist talks, knowledge sharing, performance, chai, and chaat.

Contributing artists include Moorina Bonini, Hayden Ryan, Chi Tran, Nithya Iyer, Nadeem Tiafau Eshraghi, Grace Marlow & William Maggs, Riana Head-Toussaint, Lanikyuk and more.

The event is presented as part of Creative Australia's AusArt Day. Participants are encouraged to pay what they can.

Thursday 22 October, 1:30 - 7:30pm
L1 Perry St Building

Find out more via @westspace

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Some days I look well.
Some days I don’t.
Sometimes those days are the same day.

These photographs are fragments of living with chronic illness ~ different moments in a body where pain, energy, capacity and disability can fluctuate.

Dynamic disability describes disability where impairment and capacity can change over time. Chronic pain can be particularly difficult to understand from the outside because it isn't necessarily visible, consistent or measurable in the ways we expect. This invisibility can contribute to misunderstanding, stigma and difficulties being believed or supported.

Disability studies also asks us to look beyond the individual body, and at the environments, institutions and expectations that shape how we participate in the world.

For me, managing chronic illness can become a full-time job: managing symptoms, planning around capacity, cancelling, recovering, adapting, explaining and advocating ~ while sometimes worrying that I'm talking about it too much.

This is something I’ve been thinking about in my studio, too.

I’m slowly making a new body of work for an upcoming exhibition in the West Space Window, exploring lived experiences of endometriosis, chronic pain and neurodivergence through sculpture and photography.

The work asks what it might mean to witness a body without immediately trying to fix it.

And I think this matters beyond the artwork.

Being an ally to disabled people isn't only about witnessing our pain.

It is also about witnessing our sparkle.

The joy. The humour. The art. The weirdness. The moments when we are completely ourselves.

Don’t pity us for the pain.
Don’t ignore it because we look okay.
Don’t make us prove it before making room for it.

Believe us. Accept the fluctuation. Make space for the whole person.

A body can sparkle and still hurt terribly.

Both can be true.

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One month left of ‘Unable to rest because unable to know’ currently showing in group show ‘language to reach with’ at West Space until 24 October. A young woman embarks on a pilgrimage and turns into a nonhuman figure.. Making this I was thinking a lot about doubt, bats and the figure of the spiralling mystic.

Unable to rest because unable to know, 2026
Victorian ash timber, wood stain, oil, 16:10 monitor, video (6 minutes), audio
933 x 931 x 130mm

Film Credits
Actress: Suyeon Park
Set Design/Production Assistance: Leena Luu & Jenn Tran
Narration: Hung Tran

Thank you to Suyeon Park, Leena Luu, Jenn Tran, Hung Tran, Antuong Nguyen for helping me bring the film to life, Nathan Collis for fabricating this install against time, Wen-Juenn Lee for writing a beautiful accompanying text and Tahmina Maskinyar for unlocking me again. With support from Creative Australia

Photo by Janelle Low

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Tonight, the first of West Space’s free assembly nights hosts managing editor of Overland Literary Magazine, essayist, and critic Cher Tan.

These three evenings are communal gatherings around an activity expanding on the themes of the current exhibition, “language to reach with” featuring Moorina Bonini, Nithya Iyer, and Chi Tran.

Cher Tan’s assembly night will discuss texts demonstrating the capacity and importance of expression as well as critical responses to large language models such as OpenAI. Participants are invited to bring a favourite poem, essay, or the name of a writer/critic you find interesting. This assembly is part show and tell, part gathering of words and reference points to help attune to the importance of our expression.

Wednesdays 2, 9, and 16 September, 6pm
L1 Perry St Building
Register for free online

Find out more via @westspace

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West Space Gallery presents 'language to reach' a collection of new artworks by Moorina Bonini, Chi Tran and Nithya Iyer in dialogue. The exhibition responds to the current moment where individual and independent modes of expressions continue to be calibrated by Big Tech and rhetoric agendas. The title of the exhibition references Whereas (2017) a book of poetry by Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier. In this book, Long Soldier instates language’s deep participation in life building, an active force that is strengthened by our attention to it. In the prologue of Whereas, Long Soldier says "...each People has been given their own language to reach with, I understand reaching as active, a motion."

To extend on the exhibition, a series of public programs and an artist symposium will be being held on 2 September, 9 September, 16 September and 22 October. The Assembly Nights program and artist symposium is proudly supported by the City of Yarra.

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Perfect days & red wine descriptors: elegant, a bit of structure, but not too tannic

photos from melbourne with Levi last month (phone, dslr, slr)

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@westspace Open Call
Residency in the West Space studio

Applications close 11 September 2026
Apply via the link in West Space’s bio

#OpenCall #EmergingArtists #ArtistOpportunities #MelbourneArt #MelbourneGallery

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@westspace Open Call
Presentation in the West Space window

Applications close 11 September 2026
Apply via the link in West Space’s bio

#OpenCall #EmergingArtists #ArtistOpportunities #MelbourneArt #MelbourneGallery

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‘Spilt Milk (and hard honey)’ at West Space curated by Talia Smith, takes the biblical phrase “land of milk and honey” — repurposed to sell Aotearoa and Australia as places of opportunity for Moana migrants — and interrogates the sweetness of that promise. The exhibition asks what remains when abundance comes with displacement, racism, labour exploitation and the pressure to assimilate, and what can be created in spite of it. The artists take objects and visual languages that have been commodified, flattened or interpreted through colonial frameworks and pull them apart, reshape them and make them their own.
Benjamin Akuila’s ‘Katalogue’ transforms the kato — a woven object associated with Tongan material culture and often reduced to a tourist commodity — into ceramic forms decorated with raffia, shells and gold.

Leitu Bonnici’s ‘2-22, 2-22’ stretches across the gallery like a fragmented horizon, while Axel Iva’s ‘‘OKI’ places an oversized knife delicately inside a trap.

In Emily Greenwood’s ‘O MALU’I ‘A TUPOU’, a red, fabric-heavy banner surrounds a black-and-white portrait of Queen Sālote Tupou III, her eyes obscured by the words “O MALU’I ‘A TUPOU.” The saturated red has the visual intensity of blood, while the combination of screenprint, textiles, text and painted bricks collapses distinctions between fine art, protest banner and DIY punk aesthetics.

Jimmy Ma’ia’i’s translucent fabric is almost weightless, while repeated white floral forms create a delicate surface that seems to hover between decoration and concealment.

Manu Vaea’s ‘Tau’atāina’ and ‘Manako Leitī’ bring cultural motifs, leather, yarn, acrylic and tasselled edges into expansive compositions. Their surfaces move between intimate drawing and emblematic forms, asserting the visibility of Tongan Leitī identity within cultural traditions that have too often been treated as fixed, heterosexual and historically complete.

‘Spilt Milk (and hard honey)’ suggests that the promise was never as simple as it appeared. But the exhibition doesn’t ask us to stare at what was spilled. It asks what can be made from what remains.

@westspace @edithcollier

#luminosa #luminosaartsscene #westspace

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Final Week: Explore seven Pasifika artists' work as part of Spilt Milk (and hard honey) at West Space.

The exhibition features early career artists of Moana heritage from Aotearoa and Australia exploring the biblical phrase of 'the land of milk and honey' used to describe Aotearoa and Australia as destinations of abundance. The reality however differed greatly from these promises.

“What is exciting about these artists is the way in which they assert their ‘creative sovereignty’ outside societal or art expectations. There is a confidence in their making. It brings joy to see this next link of Moana art's legacy is not afraid to voice their truth," says guest curator Talia Smith.

Wednesday 5 - Saturday 8 August
L1 Perry St Building

Find out more via @westspace

Photo: Spilt Milk (and hard honey)', installation view, 2026, with Benjamin Akuila and Manu Vaea in view, West Space. Photography by Janelle Low.

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