After a triumphant year, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) concludes 2025 with its final Season 4 (Kambarang-Birak) program, featuring two major career-defining commissions from Gadigal/Sydney-based artist Alana Hunt (NSW) and the Perth/Boorloo-based collaborative outfit Second Generation Collective (WA); as well as a cutting-edge video work from Wiradjuri artist artist Joel Sherwood Spring (NSW). The season opens from 17 October to 21 December 2025 at PICA in Perth’s Cultural Centre. 

‘Our final season for the year brings together three powerful Australian projects – deeply personal, politically charged and resonant with our times,’ says PICA CEO/Director Hannah Mathews says. ‘Through themes of home, displacement, cultural inheritance and technology, these artists explore issues embedded in Australia’s histories and lived realities. Their work not only exposes the forces that shape the places we inhabit and the identities we hold, but also opens space to imagine new ways of living together.’

Marking the fourth in the Copyright Agency Partnerships (CAP) series of annual $80,000 commissions for artists, A Deceptively Simple Need is a significant new solo exhibition from Gadigal/Sydney-based artist Alana Hunt (NSW), guest curated by Jasmin Stephens. Delivered in partnership with leading Australian galleries, the CAP initiative supports mid-career and established Australian artists in developing and presenting major new bodies of work.

A non-Indigenous person, Alana’s project is fuelled by the proposition: What does the need for home mean when it causes the dispossession of someone else from theirs? 

Drawing on personal experiences of housing insecurity, an archive of state sponsored films produced at a time when Western Australia celebrated its one millionth citizen, and the great Australian dream of property ownership, Hunt’s work ruptures the core of settler colonialism exposing how the basic need for home is intricately linked to the continuum of colonial injustice. 

Building on the last decade of her life on Gija and Miriwoong Countries in the north of WA, Hunt digs deep into the fact that every home exists on stolen land and is central to the displacement of First Nations peoples, drawing connections to the current housing crisis and the contrasting dynamics of wealth accumulation.

Blending historical archives, sentiments, economies and lived experiences, the exhibition features an accumulative re-edit of filmmaker Bryan Lobascher’s films commissioned by the WA Government in the 1960s and 70s, currently housed in the State Library of WA. Hunt reworks Lobascher’s films, which promote WA as the ‘destination of a good life’ and promise economic idealism to reveal a volatile subtext infused with violence and innuendo. In another video a young child writes the titles of Lobascher’s films by hand like disciplinary lines in a school detention, exposing how these nationalist narratives shape our worldviews.

A new series of photographic and film works draw attention to Australia’s contemporary housing crises through luxury cars, the dream of home ownership and the lived reality of housing precarity.

Two companion video works explore the ‘Great Australian Dream’ of home ownership, presenting both the iconic Australian beachside and scenes of bricklaying at a South Fremantle construction site evoking the impossibilities and persistence of arrival and departure, of construction and deconstruction.

‘Despite the political rhetoric, legal processes in Australia have consistently maintained the sanctity of home (private property ownership) for the settler colonist, while systematically excluding or limiting Aboriginal ownership since the lie of terra nullius,’ says Hunt. ‘This exclusion has been at the core of wealth accumulation on this continent. Ironically, Australia now faces a housing crisis fuelled by legislation and tax concessions of its own making. This strikes a personal chord; as a child I was raised with a volatile sense of housing insecurity, something I still grapple with today. Every person needs a home. But we need to reckon with the consequences of that need when it occurs on other peoples’ land.’

Vádyé Eshgh وادی عشق  (Valley of Love) is a defining new work from Second Generation Collective (WA) made possible by funding from Creative Australia’s Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy (VACS) Major Commissioning Projects Fund– the first of the commissions to be awarded to a Western-Australian-based recipient.

Bridging generational gaps, the work of Second Generation Collective highlights the lived experiences of Iranian-Australians who fled Iran during the 1979 Revolution, and their children raised on Noongar boodja. Their art is shaped by the intergenerational transmission of stories, exploring the lasting impact of displacement and the healing power of empathy in community building. 

The Second Generation Collective – founded in 2020 by Iranian-Australian video artist Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson (PICA Hatched alum 2018) and Gujurati-Irish Australian performer, film-maker and musician Asha Kiani – comprises emerging Iranian and South-Asian artists in Boorloo/Perth. Combining mediums of film, performance, poetry, painting, sculpture, personal archives, music, and installation, the Collective shares and reimagines personal stories to heal collective trauma, fostering intergenerational connection and promoting empathy as a tool for unity.

Vádyé Eshgh وادی عشق  (Valley of Love) stems from an excerpt of The Seven Valleys – a book written in Persian by Baháʼu’lláh, the founder of the Baháʼí Faith, exploring the metaphorical journey of the soul through different stages of life.

Developed in conjunction with creative advisor, renowned WA artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, this powerful multi-disciplinary immersive installation offers an emotive and layered reflection on identity, spirituality, and displacement, highlighting themes of remembrance, grief, and the divine nature of love. 

Through this work, the Collective seeks to highlight and celebrate the profound beauty, complexity and diversity of their heritage by weaving symbolic motifs inspired by ancient Persian and South Asian aesthetic. Accompanied by a major wall mural by Khashayar Salmanzadeh, Vádyé Eshgh وادی عشق  (Valley of Love) draws on the universal human experience of love, sacrifice, displacement and renewal –tracing powerful journeys of fleeing homelands, surrendering to the unknown and reuniting with divine love. 

On behalf of the collective, co-founders Eshraghian-Haakansson and Kiani state: ‘What a power is love! As we deepen our commitment to fostering unity and amplifying voices of empathy, we are humbled and proud to be called to make a major work that explores the human journey through love and fortitude.

‘For us, creative expression is key to confronting, acknowledging and celebrating our shared histories, communal differences, spiritual connections and the oneness of all peoples. To represent our heritage in PICA, WA’s most widely recognised contemporary art space, is a history-making moment that we embrace with courage, gratitude and excitement.’

‘What a power is love! It is the most wonderful, the greatest of all living powers. Love gives life to the lifeless. Love lights a flame in the heart that is cold. Love brings hope to the hopeless and gladdens the hearts of the sorrowful. In the world of existence there is indeed no greater power than the power of love.’ -Abdu’l-Baha

In his latest video, SETTLED, Wiradjuri artist Joel Sherwood Spring(NSW)critically addresses the increasingly pervasive effects of new technologies on our human experience of the world and the ongoing capitalist extraction of Aboriginal culture. 

An anti-disciplinary practitioner, Sherwood Spring explores the spatial dynamics of power through collaborative projects spanning art, design, architecture and education.

Developed in collaboration with mob.io – a pro-Indigenous grassroots software company – SETTLED takes the form of an infomercial, featuring a young tech professional promoting a wellness app called ‘Settled’.

Their scripted spiel has the subtle, slippery fluency of ChatGPT. Beneath the surface, racist logic and embedded biases emerge, while subtle digital glitches suggest the speaker may be an AI-generated deepfake rather than a real person.

Designed as a multifunctional tool – from a dating app to a platform for social justice warriors and even a ‘green app’ promising data sovereignty – ‘Settled’ is positioned as a sleek technological fix for the profound legacy of settler colonialism in Australia.

Alana Hunt: A Deceptively Simple Need is presented in partnership with the Copyright Agency as part of the 2025 Copyright Agency Partnerships (CAP) Commission and supported through the generosity of PICA’s Art Commissioners.

Second Generation Collective: Vádyé Eshgh وادی عشق  (Valley of Love) is supported by Creative Australia’s Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy (VACS) Major Commissioning Projects Fund and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

PICA’s Season 4 Kambarang-Birak season program is on display from 17 October to 21 December 2025 at PICA in Perth’s Cultural Centre.

Images: Alana Hunt, ‘The Deceptively Simple Need For A Home (on other peoples’ land)’, 2025, super 8mm film still, image courtesy of the artist; Joel Sherwood Spring, ‘SETTLED’, 2024, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) Photo: Andrew Curtis