Starting at Syed’s dynamic sculpture Ripple Effect at the entrance to PHIVE, the tour will take a personal journey looking through the lens of a self-defined ‘peripheral insider’ who arrived in Australia in 2006 and made Western Sydney home. As the tour moves through the local area, the artist navigates, marks and critically analyses the urban environment through his own diaspora experience and memories of home. Syed invites consideration of what community building means, the impact of development and how public art activates a site and generates feelings of inclusiveness, reflexivity and belonging (or unbelonging).
Ripple Effects – Parramatta Walking Tour forms part of the Building Communities program curated by Kate Goodwin with Qianyi Lim from Architecture Amplified. This program explores the inter-relationship of architecture, community and equitable environments through a program of walks, talks and site-specific performances.
Speakers
Abdullah M. I. Syed is an interdisciplinary artist and designer who champions the power of storytelling from a cross-cultural perspective. Syed’s work spans drawing, sculpture, video installations, photography, performance, text and public art commissions. He fuses his Pakistani Muslim heritage, interest in materiality, spirituality, nature, abstraction and the influences of his everyday experiences to create art forms of poetic resistance, which the artist terms manzoom muzahamat. He was an artist in residence at Parramatta Artists’ Studios (2012-2015) and is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney.
Architecture Amplified is a forum for an inclusive, inspiring and critical examination of architecture and society today. It uses inventive curatorial formats that amplify the architectural context in which events are hosted. It celebrates architects as designers, thought-leaders, advocates, activists, writers, researchers and creative producers, broadening how, where and when architectural knowledge is applied. Architecture Amplified is conceived by Kate Goodwin, Olivia Hyde and Qianyi Lim, professors of practice (architecture) at the University of Sydney.
