There is no easy entry point into the Campbelltown Arts Centre’s latest exhibition. That’s precisely the point. Titled In Every Room, this curated collection of works by six contemporary artists drags memory into the present, daring audiences to question which stories are remembered, which are erased, and who gets to do the telling.
Forget white walls and neat explanations. These works spill across mediums and geographies, offering little comfort. Instead, they take visitors into contested zones—political, historical, and personal—where grief and resistance sit side by side.
Jagath Dheerasekara’s Gaja: a story of the elephant is perhaps the most immediately disarming. A large-scale, multi-channel video installation, it combines embroidered costumes with performance, presenting the slow disappearance of the Sri Lankan elephant as a metaphor for the long shadow of colonisation. Dheerasekara doesn’t narrate with anger or nostalgia. He dresses the trauma in colour and movement, inviting viewers to stay long enough for the discomfort to settle. According to “Campbelltown Arts Centre,” the work cloaks a morbid reality in playful disguise.
That tension between beauty and brutality recurs throughout. In Field Recording, filmmaker Kuba Dorabialski confronts the siege of Sarajevo. Shot in the very place where those events unfolded, his new film asks who owns a story once it enters the collective domain. Who has the right to narrate conflict? Who carries the burden of memory? And what happens when these roles no longer match the facts?
Melbourne-based artist Roberta Joy Rich offers a different kind of excavation. Her video and sound installation brings to light the little-known life of Khoikhoi Chief David Stuurman, a figure deported to Australia during the early colonial period. His story, barely noted in official histories, is traced through faint archival clues. Rich’s work doesn’t attempt to fill in the blanks. It honours the gaps, the silences, and the weight of that absence. According to the artist, the aim is to keep alive the stories of those who fought and still fight for justice.
Together, these works form an uneasy chorus. Each artist moves with care through difficult territory, aware of the lines between documentation, interpretation, and appropriation. There’s no sense of closure here, no call to action neatly packaged in curatorial language. Instead, in every room offers a kind of sensory witnessing—and perhaps that’s enough.
For an exhibition rooted in history, its questions are startlingly current. The artists are not gesturing at the past to tidy it up. They are asking audiences to notice how those legacies operate in the present—in policy, protest, language, and silence. The title itself suggests presence. Not “in some rooms.” Not “in the back room.” But in every room.
This is a show with civic teeth. It is also deeply local. “We’re proud to have such an incredible exhibition showing here in Campbelltown,” said Mayor Darcy Lound. “It presents our residents with an opportunity to experience exceptional work close to home and strengthens our presence as a thriving destination for the arts.”
Campbelltown Arts Centre has quietly built a reputation for asking difficult questions in welcoming ways. Located on Dharawal Land, its approach has consistently foregrounded the role of artists as cultural workers and community provocateurs, not just producers of objects.
Curators Eddie Abd, Isabelle Morgan, and Emily Rolfe haven’t simply assembled a group show. They’ve created a space for intergenerational exchange, carving out a dedicated section for children and young people. In an age of culture wars and educational sanitisation, that choice feels quietly radical.
Director Mouna Zaylah sums it up succinctly: “In every room boldly interrogates both personal and collective histories, questioning how they shape the world we inhabit. With a mix of new and existing works, each artist brings a unique perspective.”
The exhibition opens 5 July and runs until 14 September 2025.
More details at: www.campbelltownartscentre.com.au
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