HOLDING SPACE 2025: Rituals of Welcome Exhibition
Exhibition
2025
HOLDING SPACE is a three year annual program of artistic commissions, creative developments, workshops, public programs and events that aims to provide a provocation and a forum to share cultural and creative ideas, experiences, understandings and learnings centred around belonging and community connectedness. In 2025, the theme was Rituals of Welcome. Learn more about the 18 artists here.
On the 6th and 7th of December 2025, CuriousWorks and SSI held our joint exhibition Rituals of Welcome as part of the HOLDING SPACE program. Held at the Community Refugee Welcome Centre, attendees were treated to dance perfomances by Vishnu Arunasalam - Evoking Vanakkam and Guillermo Robayo Gómez and Black Feather Circle’s Dancing With The Roots.Community members also had the opportunity to participate in workshops including Kumari Abeydeera’s Clay Rituals and Justine Youssef’s Scent Distillation. You can read more about the workshops here.
The weekend was a celebration of the culmination of Rituals of Welcome – showcasing the work of 12 project artists and over 200 community participants, engaged in residencies, creative developments and community based workshops in 2025.
Scroll down to learn more about the visual artworks. You can also peruse and download our full exhibition catalogue here.
If you would like to view the short films by artists: Jacinta Tobin, Oonagh Sherrard, Shervin Mirzeinali & Wendy Qi Zhang, then please head to this page here.
This exhibition was part of the HOLDING SPACE 2025: Rituals of Welcome showcase events, which unfolded over three days and at two locations. To learn more about the first showcase event that was held at the Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House, please head to this link here.
Threads of Home
Damon Amb
Paintings (mixed media) & 12 photographs
Threads of Home is a meditation on belonging, displacement, and the shared human rituals that bind us to one another. Through photography and painting, Damon weaves connections between Persian traditions of hospitality and the welcoming ceremonies of First Nations people in Australia. For him, home has never been a fixed place but a shifting memory — an invisible fabric made of people, gestures, and the small rituals that keep us human. In this body of work, he returns to the symbols that have long defined welcome in his culture: water for purity, salt for loyalty, food for hospitality, and esfand smoke for protection. These same elements echo across continents — in the smoke of ceremony, in the warmth of shared food, and in the sacredness of gathering.
In Threads of Home, Damon honours the spirit of those who open their hearts and homes, who keep the fire burning and the water flowing. This work is an invitation — to listen, to breathe, and to feel the subtle power of being welcomed, and of welcoming others in return.
Seeds of Welcoming
Maryam Hosseini
100 x 100cm, Acrylic on canvas
In this painting, I wanted to show the welcoming part of our culture in Afghanistan. Women have the main role in this tradition. Although they face many barriers and hardships in their lives, they still heal their emotional and physical wounds.
The woman sewing pomegranate seeds — symbols of love — onto the guest’s sleeve represents how Afghan women share warmth, kindness, and connection through their hospitality. My work explores the quiet strength and nurturing spirit of women through the interconnectedness of culture, nature, and emotion. I am drawn to stories of resilience, healing, and belonging themes that emerge through gentle colours, layered textures, and symbolic imagery.
Rooted in my cultural heritage and shaped by my experiences across different landscapes, my paintings often reflect moments of peace, reflection, and connection. Whether portraying women sewing seeds of welcome or resting in nature’s embrace, I aim to capture the grace and power found in everyday acts of care and renewal.
Healing Ground
Hosna Saif
Charcoal and coloured pencil on paper
If the land were a human, it would be a mother. Aboriginal people see the land this way too, because only a mother can endure so much, yet remain strong, nurturing, and full of power. For me, the ritual of welcome is the energy I receive from people, the warmth they share, and the connection I feel with nature, the bond between humans and the world around us.
This is how I felt welcomed in this beautiful country, with its green spaces and open skies, a place where I could finally begin to bloom. The dark tones in my work reflect the hardships and struggles I carried, while the flowers and lighter shades represent growth, hope, and renewal. Through this piece, I celebrate resilience, the strength found in care and connection, and the journey from endurance to flourishing.
Spirit of Welcome
Ezra Mukendi
Acrylic on canvas
Overall my paintings explore the spirit of welcome through culture, nature, and gratitude. They connect with my African roots, the warmth of Aboriginal culture and the harmony of Australia's natural beauty.
1. Spirit of Welcome honours the first peoples of Australia and expresses gratitude for the welcome that made this land feel like home.
2. Harmony of home: Two cockatoos symbolise friendship and belonging, reflecting nature's quiet ritual of welcome.
3. Roots of celebration (African traditional dance) celebrate African traditional dance through rhythm, unity, and joy.
My paintings explore the spirit of welcome through culture, nature, and gratitude. They weave together my African roots, the warmth of Aboriginal culture, and the harmony of Australia’s natural beauty. Through colour, pattern, and organic form, I express a sense of belonging and connection to land, to people, and to shared moments of openness and appreciation.
Blessed Milk Thistle
Justine Youssef
Digital prints on textured cotton rag
For Rituals of Welcome, I present a scented oil distilled from ‘Blessed Milk Thistle’ using a process inherited from my mother and her lineage. This work proposes the act of sharing scent as a transformative process to navigate complex histories and encourage connectedness.
The plant itself embodies paradoxical welcomes. In Lebanon, it is a sacred sustainer, believed to have been blessed by a drop of the Virgin Mary’s milk, which made it a vital food for lactating mothers and a shield against famine. On Dharug Country, however, it was introduced by settlers for medicinal use. It quickly eluded cultivation, developing noxious qualities under the unique climate, and is now considered highly invasive across the region. By engaging with its entire story—its thorns and its medicine—my practice performs a ritual of welcome towards these difficult, entangled truths. I invite audiences to encounter this scent not as a simple comfort, but as a portal to shared narratives of displacement and steadfastness.
This work suggests that true connectedness across cultures begins by welcoming the prickly and the historically charged, transforming exhibition spaces into sites of nuanced, sensory dialogue.
Clay Rituals
Kumari Abeydeera
Clay
The clay rituals workshops facilitated by Kumari Abeydeera gathered participants from diverse backgrounds to connect to culturally imbued knowledges through the portals of clay and community ritual. Participants were guided to hand-build and embellish clay vessels to re-story their experiences of migration, embodied herstories, ancestral practices and more. Together we used clay storytelling methods to explore themes including Grandmother's stories, Moon rituals and Radical re-membering.
Participants described how working with the clay was grounding, stretched time and held healing and liberatory possibilities. The tenderness of the clay and the collective care that was woven by participants provided a safe space for storytelling, co-weaving a community space for belonging and kinship through culturally imbued creative practice.
Ritual Mending: Lineage, Plants and Gifts
Paula do Prado
Thread, textured yarn, fabric offcuts
Rituals of Mending: Lineage, Plants and Gifts was a series of three creative textile and fibre workshops facilitated by artist Paula do Prado. Ritual Mending was intended as an invitation to co-create a creative and generative space to both directly and indirectly acknowledge that many different groups of people experience disconnection from ancestral, familial and cultural ritual practices as a result of displacement, migration and diaspora. The resultant material outcomes from the workshops affirm the inherent value in making time and space for collective creative expression as a way to reconnect with self, whilst also surfacing in-common narratives and strengthening community bonds.
Workshop participants were guided as they worked towards open ended outcomes in response to reference materials including collected keepsakes, botanical materials and artwork samples. With thread as our shared language, for some this was their first experience of making in a workshop setting without following a set of steps or template to achieve a particular outcome. The works produced demonstrate participants drawing from and trusting their own inner creative knowing.
Time to Weave
Jessica Tobin
As part of the Rituals of Welcome program, First Nation artist Jessica Tobin led hands-on weaving workshops exploring the art of making bracelets. Participants learnt simple weaving techniques while reflecting on the significance of welcome, belonging, and cultural exchange. These gentle, creative sessions offered space for connection, conversation, and care through the shared act of making.
CREDITS
HOLDING SPACE is funded by the NSW Government through the Multicultural NSW COMPACT Program. Our project collaborators are SSI’s Community Refugee Welcome Centre located at Callan Park, Lilyfield, and Community Partners Sydney Opera House.
The 2025 HOLDING SPACE artists are Damon Amb, Elizabeth Jigalin, Ezra Mukendi, Hosna Saif, Jacinta Tobin, Jessica Tobin, Justine Youssef, Kumari Abeydeera, Maryam Hosseini, Oonagh Sherrard, Paula do Prado, Shervin Mirzeinali, Shyamla Eswaran (Bindi Bosses), Vishnu Arunasalam, Wendy Qi Zhang, Metin Yilmaz, Damian Wright, Guillermo Robayo Gómez & Black Feather Circle.
All photos were taken by Damon Amb except for the workshop images in the above gallery, which were taken by Jenny Trinh.
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