a/part: Friendship as Practice

About the speakers

• More details about Hoda Afshar

  Hoda Afshar

  Hoda Afshar is a visual artist whose practice focuses on the intricate relationships between politics and aesthetics, knowledge and representation, visibility and violence. She is interested in the ways that image-making can either reinforce or challenge our common sense, and the forces that shape perception. Her works invite audiences to reflect on and to rethink how and what we see, often by drawing attention to parts of the political and visible order that have previously been excluded.

• More details about Vernon Ah Kee

  Vernon Ah Kee

  Vernon Ah Kee’s conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings form a critique of Australian culture from the perspective of the Aboriginal experience of contemporary life. Ah Kee’s works respond to the history of the romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’, and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’, anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time.

• More details about Behrouz Boochani

  Behrouz Boochani

  Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish author and journalist based in New Zealand who was incarcerated as a political prisoner by the Australian government on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea (2013-2019). His book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador 2018) has won numerous awards including the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature Australia, the National Biography Award Australia, and the Australia, book industry award. He is co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of the 2017 feature-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time. The film was shot over six months on a smartphone. The film had its world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival and was shown at some other international film festivals such as London Film Festival and Gothenburg Film Festival. Boochani published the book “ Freedom, Only Freedom” (Edited and translated: by Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi) in 2022 by Bloomsbury in London. In this book, his collected writings are combined with essays from experts on migration, refugees' rights, politics and literature. His third book is a collection of short stories called “The stories from another island” which is going to be published in March 2027 by Picador.

• More details about Prof. Nikos Papastergiadis

  Prof. Nikos Papastergiadis

  Nikos Papastergiadis is the Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, based at The University of Melbourne. He is a Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne and founder - with Scott McQuire - of the Spatial Aesthetics research cluster. He is Project Leader of the Australian Research Council Linkage Project, 'Large Screens and the Transnational Public Sphere', and Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project 'Public Screens and the Transformation of Public Space'. He was educated at The University of Melbourne and the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the School of Culture and Communication, he was Deputy Director of the Australia Centre at the University of Melbourne, Head of the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of Arts, and lecturer in Sociology and recipient of the Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester. Throughout his career, Nikos has provided strategic consultancies for government agencies on issues relating to cultural identity and has worked in collaborative projects with artists and theorists of international repute such as John Berger, Jimmie Durham and Sonya Boyce. His long involvement with the ground breaking international journal Third Text, as both co-editor and author, was a formative experience in the development of an interdisciplinary and cross cultural research model, which continues to inform his research practice. His publications include Modernity as Exile (1993), Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998), The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Metaphor and Tension (2004) Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday (2006), Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012). He is also the author of numerous essays, which have been translated into over a dozen languages and appeared in major catalogues such as the Biennales of Sydney, Liverpool, Istanbul, Gwangju, Taipei, Lyon, Thessaloniki and Documenta 13.

  • Prof. Nikos Papastergiadis's website
• More details about Jade Lane

  Jade Lane

  Jade is a Punthamara woman descendant of her grandmother and father, and she has connections to Wooribinda. Jade grew up in Western Sydney on Dharug land, which is the community she is known and accepted in. Jade’s background is in social impact, working across peak bodies in Indigenous affairs including Aurora, The Australian Indigenous Leadership Centre and Reconciliation Australia. Jade is CEO of Change the Record. She has designed and delivered programs nationally and at a state level for over a decade.Working as an advocate for systemic reform and the advancement of First Nations human rights has been the defining focus of Jade’s career. Her work is grounded in a deep commitment to self-determination and the belief that lasting change must be driven by strong First Nations governance and community leadership. Jade brings a passionate, principled approach to advocacy, ensuring that every effort to address injustice is led by empowered First Nations voices. She believes that responses to systemic inequality must reflect the urgency of a national crisis — one marked by the ongoing violation of First Nations people's human rights. Her work supports bold, community-led action that demands accountability, transformation, and justice.

  • Jade Lane's website
  • Jade Lane's instagram
  • Jade Lane's facebook
• More details about Shanysa McConville

  Shanysa McConville

  Shanysa McConville is an Eastern Arrernte woman based in Naarm (Melbourne). She received a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Ancient World Studies from the University of Melbourne, before beginning her curatorial work with their Museums and Collections department. Shanysa is currently the Associate Curator, Art Museums and Indigenous Collections, and recently co-curated the major exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art at the Potter Museum of Art. In addition to these roles, Shanysa teaches Indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne and Deakin University.