Hear from the artists of Second Generation Collective as they reflect on Vádyé Eshgh (Valley of Love), a major new commission shaped by shared histories of migration, faith and belonging. Founded by Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson and Asha Kiani, the Collective centres the lived experiences of Iranian-Australians who fled Iran after the 1979 Revolution, and of their children raised on Noongar boodja.
Drawing inspiration from The Seven Valleys by Baháʼu’lláh, the artists speak about love as a spiritual journey, through grief, surrender and remembrance. Through film, mural and installation, Valley of Love becomes a space to explore displacement, identity and the enduring, divine power of love, woven through Persian and South Asian visual languages and collective memory. Exhibited at PICA 17 October – 21 December 2025.

[Asha Kiani] Welcome to Vádyé Eshgh, The Valley of Love, by the Second Generation Collective. I am Asha Kiani, this exhibition is the culmination of work by all the artists in our collective, and it’s incredibly special. Second Generation Collective was founded about five years ago by Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson and I, and it was born out of an exploration of dual identity, heritage, the desire to feel close to our parents and our grandparents and to understand ourselves and belong in contemporary Australia. We wanted to form a platform to explore this with our community. The collective is made up of emerging Iranian-Australian artists and South Asian artists. In previous works we have shared the story of families who left Iran. In 1979 there was a revolution and minority groups began being persecuted, including members of the Baha’i community. And that began, as is so many stories with displacement, a need for survival and a process of decision-making for families of how to escape, how to leave and how to survive.  Exploring these stories, families who came particularly to Boorloo, to Perth, and then the second generation, the ones who were the first in their family born here or growing up here. We explore displacement and intergenerational trauma and what it means to belong in multiple places. What does home mean when you belong somewhere that you can’t return to? Those are the stories that we have explored in previous works. This work is us taking it to the next level. We’ve expanded beyond just the didactics of the story of leaving Iran and have taken it to a philosophical and spiritual exploration of love.

In this work, we explored a spiritual text called The Seven Valleys by Baha’u’llah, which explores the seven stages of the journey of the soul through eternal life. One of those valleys is the valley of love. We used this as a provocation to explore love. Love as sacrifice, familial love, love in difficult decisions, love between and throughout genders, romantic love, parent-child love. Our collective has multiple sibling sets and it also has parent-child members within it. That’s been a big through line of our exploration of love. The video work is a culmination of craft from everyone. It essentially follows the story of the seeker who’s the main character who is searching for reunion with the beloved, the beloved being God, being herself, being homeland. This is set against the backdrop of challenges she faces, being interrogated, being questioned, flashing between memory, which we see in the archival memories of home. I’ll pass it on to some of our amazing artists to continue sharing what this work has meant to them and their contributions to the work.

[Araan Kousari] My contribution to the work is the archival VHS footage. This footage comes from family tapes of my parents and extended family, and they span across several decades from the 1980s to the 2000s. They show the journey of displacement that my parents went through, and the things that they loved, essentially. They gave me the script to the film and throughout it there were certain sections they wanted the VHS footage to represent, like home, love, the different characters of Leilie, the Seeker, the Watchman, the Mother. I was looking for motifs that could represent love and home. These included things like flowers, nature, architecture, celebrations and dance. What’s amazing is that these were just home videos. They weren’t recorded with the intention of being in an exhibition, but I guess it just sort of runs in the culture and in like the blood, like this art and this attraction to beauty because there’s so many instances where whoever’s filming, my dad or uncle or whoever, has zoomed in on these small, beautiful details and they’re clearly appreciating the beauty in everything they love, whether it’s the decor around them or the Kurdish dresses of their family dancing.

The valley of love talks about the stages that a soul goes through on its journey to its beloved. It’s a very spiritual and mystical text. It describes love as very paradoxical in nature. You know, love can be sweet, love can be sacred, it can be pure, it can build connection and unity and it’s the building block of society and family and culture and community. But at the same time, it also can be all-consuming. It can be destructive, especially if its foundation is impure or not for the right reasons. It can lead to greed, attachment, all these destructive forces. Even if you think your love is pure and sacred, we still can end up suffering for it. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We would do anything for the people we love. We would endure any suffering, any pain. And this footage, I think, really showcases that through the lens of my parents and their journey of displacement. Some of the footage shows the terrible conditions of the refugee hotels they stayed in Turkey as they were transitioning between Iran and Australia. It shows the things they loved in Iran and their family and their culture and the things that they had to leave behind and try to recreate in Australia. We see the suffering, the sacrifice, the pain they endured in this journey to leave Iran and seek out a better future for the sake of the people they love, their future children, and to be able to continue practicing their beliefs, their culture, all these things they love. I’ve always recognised the sacrifices they’ve made and the pain they’ve endured to bring us to Australia and to give us the life we have now. I think it’s a very full circle moment for their home videos and recordings of the things they love to end up in an exhibition that is celebrating their culture and sharing it to people in Australia where they felt like foreigners for a long time, but now it’s being recognised and you’re all here appreciating it.

[Ramona Zare] Hi, my name is Ramona and I made these sculptures featured in this video. You’ll see there’s three of them. There’s two pairs of hands and a mother and baby. Initially when I was asked to make these works, I was given a prompt. I would like to read my thoughts on my sculptures. I named my three sculptures Embracing Love’s Grip. Embracing Love’s Grip explores a journey through the valley of love. Inspired by the mystical texts, the Seven Valleys, the three sculptures, the steed, the lover and the watchman, each play a crucial role. The steed of this valley is pain, a bittersweet paradox of pain to find purpose. A myriad of tests the lover will endure to embrace their beloved. The lover yearns for its beloved like the sea churns to reach the moon. A force is at play, it pulls strings and sustains in the most difficult circumstances. There is nothing purer, nothing stronger and nothing more compelling than the force of love. The watchman is a constant. Like a shadow lurking behind light, its purpose lies in the chase. Run away from the shadow that prowls in the distance and the shadow will lead you to love as light. So each of these sculptures was made out of raku clay. For me that was a symbol of Australia where I have grown up, and where my parents have come to. The sculpture of the lover includes a mother and a child. I think what makes this so special to me is that they were both made out of clay and they were forged in the fire together; they endured the test of time.

[Yasamin Khadembashi] Hello, everyone, my name is Yasamin Khadembashi. I’m an artist working in painting, textile, ceramic and tattooing. My contribution to this commission was designing the body art for each character. I did this by reading through the script and creating sort of a character mood board for each of the characters. We decided to have the body art on the hands and the feet of most of the characters to create symmetry and connection between each character playing their role. The main aspect of the body art was the full back tattoo that we had on the seeker, which comprised of a Persian design of a woman with a dragon wrapped around her body. The tattoos are highly symbolic and have many meanings and references to Islamic art and a lot of art history and craftsmanship that is within Iran, highlighting and celebrating this within the film. In Iranian culture, decoration and ornamentation is a big aspect of showing our love, showing our beauty and showing off our culture. Tattooing in Iran is very taboo at the moment, but culturally and ancestrally, we’ve had khokhubu, which is a type of tattooing in Iran, and tattooing, which is a Kurdish style tattooing. I designed each tattoo for each of the characters. I wanted the seeker to be bold, to be strong, to be sharp in some areas because the seeker to me was on a journey of self-discovery and needing these tattoos as protection and blessings guiding them on their journey to find the beloved.

The actual application of the tattoos was done using tattoo stencil paper, which is traditionally what is used to put on a tattoo design and then to go over it with either a tattoo gun or with a single needle. We wanted to use the stencil paper to build a beautiful contrast between the skin and the actual design and for it to be bold and pop on screen. Because there were so many close-ups, we wanted to make sure that they were going to be clean and crisp. It was the first time I’d done tattoo designs for a film production. Usually, I just do an actual tattoo, so it was very different. But it was an amazing learning opportunity to kind of create these special effects for the body. As you will see throughout the film, each design connects to one another and tells a story about the valley of love. On Leyla’s hands, she has a hybrid between the floral design and the human. There’s a little human face on the design on her hands. I wanted to create this connection between flora, fauna and the human condition. These designs are multi-layered and multi-being. It’s a visual language that goes throughout the whole film and connects it together.

[Karmel Reema]  Hi, my name is Karmel, I struggle to refer to myself as an artist because I had a very limited understanding of what that was growing up in a family full of creatives. Over time, I’ve began to recognise that it’s more than just one thing. You can be creative in so many different ways. I contributed to this commission through set design and styling. There was a lot of visual research in the lead up. I think my lived experience and seeing my family’s struggles, seeing what their homes looked like, hearing their stories, looking through photo albums and archives of what their lives were back in Iran really informed a lot of the set design, especially in the quarry scenes. There’s this one scene where we’ve got the seeker and the lover on the couch. I was hoping to emulate a refugee’s living room in that space. It’s a lot of furniture that I either found in my own home or in the homes of those that I love that have also come from Iran. Things that I wasn’t able to find in their homes, I tried to find in op shops, on marketplace, really just trying to be frugal with the way that I was spending because it was similar to the experiences of my family. When they first came here, they didn’t have the money to spend on extravagant furniture. I was trying to honour their experiences in that way. I focused a lot on the textiles and fabrics, the way they look, the way they engage and interact with the nature, how they relate to the characters and what their stories represent. So there was a focus on colour. I really wanted the outdoor scenes I to have warm, homey colours. I wanted something that felt familiar to people with my experience and background. And then we’ve got the scene in the interrogation room. I wanted that to be very simple, very stripped back, very cold. It was important for me to have that contrast between the two environments.

The narrative of Lele and Majnun really resonates with me from the Seven Valleys text. Majnun is this character who yearns for his lover, and he’s seeking her everywhere. He’s looking in the dirt, he’s looking in every crevice he finds out of desperation for that which he seeks. We have a Watchman character in the narrative who chases him, and there’s this pressure and time crunch, he’s rushing trying to find his lover. I’m going to spoil the narrative, but at the end, the Watchman essentially guides Majnun too late. What I take away from that story is that sometimes we go through experiences not understanding the wisdom and struggling through them and really asking why am I facing this challenge? What is the purpose in this thing that I’m going through? I’ve found that over time, the wisdom comes to me. If I just allow myself to detach and take a step back and allow time to do what it’s going to do, I’m often able to find some kind of deeper purpose and gain a new insight or learning. That’s why I really wanted the scenes in the interrogation room to feel very cold and distant because the Watchman’s character is being represented and Asha’s character is struggling through this interrogation scene, not knowing that there’s purpose, there’s wisdom behind it. The costumes were also found within my own collection and from op shopping. I took a lot of inspiration again from my family, like looking through photo albums. What was my father wearing? What was my grandfather wearing? When we look at the father in this scene, when I found this outfit, I thought, ‘this is so baba’, which is the translation of dad in Farsi and many other Middle Eastern languages. I was paying a lot of attention to the colours and what those things represent to me and many other viewers of this piece.

One last thing I just remembered, in the interrogation scene, there are a bunch of documents on the table. For me, it was important to honour my family and the people who came before me who also had talent and creativity, but had to prioritise finances so that they could support their families. One of those people is my grandfather who passed away last year. He was an amazing photographer. Photography is one of the disciplines that I practice in my own creativity. It was important for me that he’s also seen. I want people to know that I am the way I am because of the blood that runs through my skin. I think, of course, creativity is something that can be fostered, but I’m very fortunate that from both sides of my family, I come from a great lineage of artists, and I really wanted to pay homage to them. I’m very fortunate that my mum was a part of this project as well. My mum did all these beautiful textiles and embroidery pieces. I think giving thanks to my family is such a big part of the second-generation experience. Like Araan was mentioning earlier, there’s an eternal amount of gratitude for our parents who went through all the struggles and the turmoil that they did to grant us the opportunities that we have today. It doesn’t feel right to participate in such an incredible project without honouring my family as well.

Images: Weekends at PICA Artist Talk, Second Generation Collective, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2025. Photos: Tristan McKenzie. Images: Weekends at PICA Artist Talk, Second Generation Collective, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2025. Photos: Rebecca Mansell

This project is supported by Creative Australia’s Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy (VACS) Major Commissioning Projects Fund and through the generosity of PICA’s Art Commissioners.