Sanctuary Summit

"The human is not a neutral term."

Rosi Briadotti

If human identity is historically constructed and politically charged, then the spaces we create — from state borders to makeshift dwellings — are equally contested. Shelter, while recognised as a human right, and needed across many different species, is never guaranteed. For many, it is precarious, provisional, or violently denied.

Across history, tents have been mobilised as a temporary architecture of survival — from refugee camps and climate disaster zones to the improvised dwellings of the displaced — while simultaneously being deployed as potent tools of protest. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, first established on the lawns of Old Parliament House in 1972, remains one of the most enduring and powerful acts of First Nations sovereignty, asserting political, social, and physical space. Globally, the image of encampment continues to resonate across activist movements — from Occupy Wall Street to the Sanctuary Movements in the United States, where faith-based communities offered shelter to migrants resisting deportation, to the encampment at Binybara (Lee Point) in 2024. In all these contexts, the tent stands as both collapsible and resilient: a fragile fabric shelter that becomes a symbol of collective strength.

Here in contemporary Australia, the idea of a tent is more often associated with leisure — camping, a chosen shelter, a symbol of the luxury of free time and a way to ‘return to nature’. Yet, the dualities of such a space of both refuge and resistance, and their ability to create communities where there was none, sit at the heart of Sanctuary Summit.

Bringing together contemporary artists from Australia and abroad, this exhibition assembles temporary sanctuaries within and beyond the gallery walls. Rushdi Anwar’s Patterns of Displacement, 2017, made by the children in the school of the Arbat Refugee Camp, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, focuses on the plight of its youth, the ‘tent’ revealing the names of over 280 children whose identities are largely invisible within a political landscape of ongoing international calamity. A testament to the precarious architecture of war, it sits adjacent to Allison Chhorn’s Skin Shade Night Day, 2022, whose artwork was prompted by experiences of gardening alongside her mother and learning how her family fled the Khmer Rouge. Both large-scale installations examine displace and memory through the architecture of the exiled.

Meanwhile Richard Bell’s Tent Embassy is being erected for the first time in the Darwin with biting humour and uncompromising critique to the bustle of a local tent city, the Parap Markets. His short film No Tin Shack, 2022, plays alongside Night Time Go, 2020, by Karrabing Film Collective. Both Bell and Karrabing provide stark tellings of Indigenous experiences of home in the wake of colonisation. Where Night Time Go is an exploration of the settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War, No Tin Shack is a sharp seven minute story, depicting the violent destruction of a bush home in order to make way for a new development.

The ever encroaching urban sprawl, the new homes trampling the old, is present also in the work of Cyan Lee and Laniyuk, who offer grounded perspectives on land and the ongoing struggle for justice in the Top End. Recently spurred by the development plans for Lee Point, the two artists and activists have chosen to respond both to the theme and to each other in their same-titled poem and collage Protectors Not Protestors, 2025 — a reflection, more than a year on from the Binyabara encampment, grounded in their shared connection to the land under threat.

The Friends of Lee Point offer documentation of local ongoing acts of resistance against environmental destruction and erasure of homes of avian species in Untitled, 2025; Dead Cars, 2024 and Sticker Art, 2025.

Together, these practices — spanning professional artists and grassroots movements — form a network of embassies and encampments: expressions of human inhabitation that speak across borders.

Curated by NCCA’s Assistant Curator, Zoë Slee, Sanctuary Summit draws on the writing of Dutch artist and theorist Jonas Staal, whose work on propaganda examines how artistic practice can be collaboratively deployed as a tool for mobilisation and transformation for a global good. Staal argues that propaganda is not only an instrument of power but also a means of building alternative assemblies and imagining new futures. In this spirit, Sanctuary Summit positions art not as passive reflection but as active proposition — a form of assembly, a demand for dignity, a reimagining of shelter.

Rather than offering a singular narrative, the exhibition invites dialogue, and activation. It asks audiences to consider how the fragile, temporary, and opportunistic act of occupation might create space for solidarity — and for imagining more habitable futures.

Written by Zoë Slee

Image caption: Allison Chhorn, Skin Shade Night Day (detail), 2022, installation view, The National 4: Australian Art Now, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2023, 4-channel digital video, HD, colour; 12-channel audio; shade cloth, coir; image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jenni Carter

References

1. Rosi Braidotti, Necropolitics and Ways of Dying, Sonic Acts Festival 2019 – Hereafter, 12:26/26:25 minutes. Recorded 22 February 2019 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, uploaded 3 April 2019, last accessed 9 Sept 2025.

2. Jonas Staal, New World Embassy: Rojava, 2016; Museum as Parliament, 2018-ongoing;Climate Propagandas Congregation, 2024.  All accessible via https://www.jonasstaal.nl/, last accessed 30 September 2025. 

3. Jonas Staal, ‘Assemblism’, e-flux, edition 80, March 2017,  https://www.e-flux.com/journal/80/100465/assemblism, last accessed 30 September 2025.

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This exhibition is proudly supported by the Northern Territory Government, Creative Australia, Melaleuca Australia and our philanthropic patrons. 

Sanctuary Summit opening speech, delivered by Zelda Piggot on behalf of Kwame Selormey, CEO of Melaleuca Australia.

This exhibition begins where the first stores of this place begun — on Larrakia land. A land that understands displacement, resilience and return — and welcomes stories from across the world to rest beside its own.

My name is Zelda Pigott, Manager Health & Wellbeing Services at Melaleuca Australia. I am honoured to represent our CEO, Kwame Selormey, who is unable to be here this evening. I am here to share his words with you.

Melaleuca Australia is one of Australia’s eight Humanitarian Settlement Service Providers and one of eight specialist services delivering the Program of Assistance for Survivors of Torture and Trauma.

Every day, we walk alongside people of extraordinary resilience — people who have endured unimaginable journeys and yet hold steadfast hope for a better world. 

Living among us here in Darwin, these individuals bring with them cultures, skills, languages and perspectives from across the globe. According to the UNHCR, the world is facing an unprecedented

displacement crisis. At the end of 2024, 123 million people were forcibly displaced — that’s one in every 67 people on Earth. Half of them are children. These figures have doubled in just ten years — a staggering reflection of our world today.

Yet behind these numbers are people — individuals whose lives are no less valuable than our own. People with dreams, with friends and families, with talents that deserve to be seen. People who want to contribute. People who want to belong.

And that’s what brings us here tonight.

This exhibition invites us into a space where art depicts sanctuary — where stories of displacement find belonging in this place we call home, here in Darwin. These frames are the skeletons that hold the flesh of stories. Each piece forms a small room — a sanctuary — where pain and hope coexist. Some of these frames hold the stories of children from the Arbat Refugee Camp near Sulaimani — their small hands etching words into the world beyond their imagination. Those words have landed here.

Some works recall the memories of the Khmer Rouge — a period of immense suffering that now calls us to remember not only pain, but also the courage and endurance that survived it. Others connect deeply to this land — to the storylines of First Nations peoples — whose own histories of displacement and resilience continue to shape the creative and spiritual fabric of this country. Some are of modern times and issues we aregrappling with today.

In being here tonight, we all become part of that healing journey. The way I see it, art serves two vital purposes:

• It is a form of expression - a release of what words cannot carry into the outer world.

• Secondly, it is a form of witnessing, through which others travel into the artist’s world to connect with what is shared. It is where transaction meets transformation. A space where what is given and what is received both become something more.

When I think of our world today, and the ripple effects of every conflict, disaster, and displacement, it is clear that we are not isolated from any of it. We are all connected.

This morning, as I stood in this room and looked around, I first saw the art. Then behind it, I saw the artists. I saw children — then parents, communities, fear, courage, focus — and then entire towns, neighbouring countries, and the many languages that can now be understood at the touch of a phone. I saw listeners and hosts who are proud to make room for this to surface and breath and be seen. Our proximity to it all is truly astounding.

One of my favourite writers, Arundhati Roy, once wrote: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Tonight, I invite you to be open to that possibility of connection — to see not only the art, but the hands, hearts and minds that brought it into being. To recognise that humanity is humanity — and that we are inseparable. On behalf of Melaleuca Australia, my deepest gratitude to the NCCA Board, to Petrit, Zoe, Bill & Lukas the volunteers and to everyone who has woven this exhibition together.

To all of you here this evening, may you experience the sacredness of this space — and may it remind us all of the power of art to connect, to heal and to hold hope.

Thank you.