The encounter with Familial begins before the exhibition can be entered. The photograph has not yet stabilised as an image.
Across the Burwood Street windows of the Town Hall Gallery, Nur Aishah Kenton’s enlarged fragments from Orchid tangle with reflections from the street: cars passing, students moving, the slow circulation of Swinburne University’s campus. The photographic surface becomes unstable, layered with environmental interference. The viewer does not stand before an image. The viewer negotiates a field where image and world refuse separation.
This is the condition under which Familial operates. The photograph does not enter the exhibition as a stable object of meaning. It arrives already compromised—dispersed across reflection, material, and movement. Before the viewer encounters a single work inside the gallery, the image has been displaced from its authority.
Curated by Daniel Boetker-Smith and presented by the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in partnership with Town Hall Gallery and Hawthorn Arts Centre, Familial brings together six artists whose works navigate the emotional and psychological terrain of family—of parents and children, of unbreakable bonds, tenderness, and the enduring ache of absence. It is a meditation on love and longing and the essential imprints our closest relationships leave behind. But to take this framing at face value risks obscuring the exhibition’s more rigorous proposition. What emerges across the installation is not merely a thematic exploration of family as subject, but a structural investigation of photography’s limits when confronted with relation.
Photography has historically operated as a stabilising mechanism within familial life. The family portrait, the snapshot, the album—these forms fix relation, rendering the unstable dynamics of intimacy legible and repeatable. Even in contemporary practice, where the image is often critically reflexive, it largely retains its coherence as an object.
The works insist not on the depth of familial feeling, but on the inadequacy of the image to contain it.
Familial systematically dismantles that coherence.
The exhibition is structured not around images that represent family, but around images that cannot fully contain it. Across the works, the photograph is subjected to conditions that exceed its capacity: absorbed into material systems (Kenton), degraded through technological mediation (Batniji), multiplied through repetition without resolution (Sancari), extended across duration (Hassan), constrained by serial systems under pressure (Wang), and reassembled within archives that resist closure (Varney). These are not stylistic differences. They are incompatible propositions about what photography can do when intimacy becomes its object.
Boetker-Smith’s installation reinforces this condition. The exhibition imposes no singular narrative or visual hierarchy. Instead, each artist occupies a distinct spatial and conceptual zone. Movement through the gallery is not linear but recursive. The viewer returns, reorients, re-reads. The refusal of accumulation—of moving from one resolved image to the next—produces a field of tensions that remain unresolved. Standing in front of Mariela Sancari’s frieze, I found myself stepping back and forward, trying to force resemblance where the work refused to supply it. That bodily restlessness is the exhibition’s hidden pedagogy.
Kenton: Surface
Nur Aishah Kenton is a Singapore-born, Malay-Australian artist, photographer, and educator whose practice grounds itself in collaboration and community engagement. For the past eight years, Kenton has been photographing her mother, Shuhana, within the family home in Kuala Lumpur. In Malay culture, values of duty and respect often shape parent-children relationships, creating an inherited framework of distance and deference that the camera might either reinforce or disrupt. Through this series, the camera becomes a mediator, allowing the artist and her mother to come together as collaborators rather than as figures bound by familial hierarchy.
Kenton has described Orchid not simply as a body of pictures but as a long-term attempt to understand her mother—and the evolving relationship between them—through the shared act of photographing. Her position between Melbourne and Kuala Lumpur inflects every image: intimacy, distance, migration, and inherited cultural codes all pass through the lens. The series emerges from return visits to Malaysia and from her mother’s attachment to orchids as both household presence and emotional language—a botanical lexicon through which affection might be expressed indirectly, in keeping with cultural expectations of restraint.
What gives Kenton’s work its force in Familial is its refusal to let the photograph appear as a self-sufficient image-object. The textile surfaces in the installation do not merely host photographs; they destabilise photography’s usual authority. Pattern competes with image. Material competes with depiction. The viewer cannot instantly isolate what matters because the work is structured against instant legibility. These fabric interventions—some stitched, some printed, some layered—are not decorative. They materialise the very conditions of mediation that Kenton is describing. The photograph cannot simply present the mother. It must negotiate the cultural fabric through which the mother is seen and known.
The photograph does not simply present the mother. It negotiates the cultural structures through which she is seen.
Orchid does something critically important for the exhibition as a whole: it demonstrates that familial relation is not something the photograph can simply “capture.” It must instead be negotiated across surfaces, traditions, gestures, and partial recognitions. The series’ emotional structure is inseparable from its cultural one. Kenton’s images, made within the family home and framed by Malay expectations, offer neither confession nor revelation in the manner often associated with autobiographical photographic work. Instead, they stage a subtler proposition: the camera can create a temporary relational opening without dissolving the historical structures that make such an opening necessary. That is why the fabric matters. It materialises the inherited frameworks through which mother and daughter encounter one another.
Seen internationally, Kenton’s practice belongs to a broader turn toward expanded, materially inflected forms—Zanele Muholi’s textile incorporations or LaToya Ruby Frazier’s integration of domestic materials, for example. Yet Kenton’s work remains grounded in a specifically familial economy of closeness and distance. Orchid does not romanticise relational repair. It proposes that mutual recognition is fragile, contingent, and structurally mediated. The photograph does not solve that condition. It enters it—and, in entering, makes that condition visible.
Batniji: Glitch
Taysir Batniji is a Palestinian artist born in Gaza in 1966, trained initially in painting at An-Najah National University before continuing his studies in France. His practice is marked by fragility, impermanence, and the pressure of current events and history. His book Disruptions, published by Loose Joints in 2024, won the Paris Photo–Aperture Photobook of the Year Award—a recognition that speaks to the work’s resonance within contemporary discourse. The series comprises thirty-nine screenshots taken during WhatsApp video conversations with his mother and various family members in Gaza between April 2015 and June 2017.
That biographical and geopolitical context is not background added after the fact. It is the condition of the image itself. Batniji forces the viewer to consider a connection and separation shaped by contemporary conflict, while also reflecting on how intimacy is mediated—and often compromised—in the digital age. Disruptions is one of the strongest works in Familial precisely because it makes visible the extent to which family contact under siege is mediated not by the intimacy of the call but by the instability of the transmission. Compression artefacts, green digital fields, blurred facial traces, broken continuity—these are not incidental visual effects. They are the form intimacy takes under infrastructural and political pressure. The work does not aestheticise poor resolution. It insists that the degraded image is what remains when relation is routed through conflict, distance, and constrained bandwidth.
Intimacy is routed through interruption, where the image carries not presence but the trace of connection.
The installation’s disproportion between scale and intensity is especially effective. The works are small, almost recessive, requiring proximity. That demand mirrors the intimacy of the source material while exposing its insufficiency: the closer the viewer looks, the less the image resolves. Rather than recovering presence, scrutiny produces further dissolution. Here Disruptions moves beyond a conventional reading of family photography as preservation. The work insists that the photographic image cannot secure presence when the conditions of relation are themselves unstable. The family call—that most ordinary of gestures—becomes, in Batniji’s hands, a record of what has been lost to infrastructure. Not lost in the sense of absent, but lost in the sense of never fully arriving.
Within international photographic discourse, Batniji belongs to a lineage of artists who have treated the image not as a transparent document but as a site of infrastructural violence and historical rupture. Think of Rabih Mroué’s The Pixelated Revolution or Forensic Architecture’s reconstructions of mediated violence. Yet Disruptions is distinguished by the scale of its emotional economy. It is neither monumental nor rhetorically amplified. It stays close to the family call, to the domestic interface, to the ordinary desire simply to see one’s mother. Its force comes from the fact that the ordinary has become structurally impossible. The green glitch is not a formal flourish. It is the colour of separation.
Sancari: Repetition
Mariela Sancari is an Argentinian-born, Mexico City–based artist whose project Moisés consists of a typology of portraits of men in their seventies—the age her father would be if he were alive. Sancari frames the work through the language of fantasy, fiction, denial, and the lingering doubt that follows a father’s death. “Not seeing him has made us doubt his death in many ways,” she has written. Fiction allows her to depict the unconscious reservoir of desire and fantasy surrounding that unresolved absence. The title itself—Moisés, or Moses—carries a double weight: the biblical figure as father-figure par excellence, and a common Argentinian name that could, in another life, have been her father’s. Sancari has also described the project as an “impossible search,” a formulation that positions the work not as recovery but as a process structured by irresolution.
If the viewer reads Moisés simply as a project about grief, the more unsettling proposition is missed. Typology—normally associated with order, classification, and comparative knowledge—can be turned into a structure of psychic instability. Photographing men who would be the same age as her deceased father, Sancari uses a simple visual language to situate these men in her father’s place, attempting somehow to pacify the grief she has yet to fully process. Asking her subjects to dress in her father’s clothes—and even engaging with one of them in front of the camera—creates an eerie sense both of obsession and childlike confusion. In Sancari’s work there is a persistent sense of looking for solace, in the belief that photography can provide a way of working through pain and grief. At the same time, this typological framework operates as a compensatory structure, a system designed to stabilise what cannot, in fact, be stabilised.
Repetition does not lead to recognition. It exposes the persistence of absence.
The portraits of elderly men dressed in the father’s clothes do not accumulate toward recognition. They accumulate toward breakdown. Resemblance is always close but never sufficient. Each figure approaches the father’s image only to fall away from it. The typological logic remains visible, but it no longer promises knowledge. It produces the opposite: the persistence of not-knowing. There is an undercurrent of creepiness to Sancari’s search, as though she has raised a corpse from the ground, dressed it, done its hair, smudged on some rouge to give it life. A sad desperation clings to the way these men are photographed—almost forensically. Some see Sancari trying to find peace through this book. Others see her still lost. Across the sequence, the body itself becomes unstable—tilting, turning, and fragmenting across frames—refusing to consolidate into a fixed identity.
The installation in Familial makes this failure palpable. The frieze of portraits suggests serial stability, but that stability is undermined by adjacent sculptural accumulations of prints and by the inclusion of the photobook as an object of handling and sequential disruption. The project’s second edition consists of two books with intermingled pages. That intermingling is not a design flourish. It externalises the work’s psychic logic. The book’s structure—three connected parts intertwining and overlapping, pages folding out left and right—reveals someone still in the midst of desperation, denial, and anger. The experience is akin to endlessly running through a large, tight crowd as a child trying to find your father, seeing someone who looks like him, only to discover, as you embrace him, that it is a stranger. Within the gallery, this logic extends spatially: the horizontal frieze, the dense wall accumulation, and the dispersed sculptural elements prevent any single, resolved viewpoint, compelling the viewer into a continual process of repositioning rather than recognition.
This is the deeper achievement of Moisés. Sancari uses repetition not to classify but to expose the impossibility of substitution. The result is a work in which photography’s documentary surface remains intact even as its epistemological promise collapses. This is a profound insight into loss and despair — into those moments when the eternal becomes immediate. We, like Sancari, look around for something to hold on to, to give the event some meaning. Perhaps we find it. Perhaps we don’t. Perhaps Sancari has found it through the production of her book. The exhibition leaves that question open—and that openness is precisely the point.
Hassan: Duration
EJ Hassan was a Melbourne-based photographic artist whose practice explored the abstract realm between documentary and art photographies, centring image-making within her own family and focusing on the politics of identity and memory, specifically related to motherhood and youth. Hassan’s work emerges from a practice of pause, attentiveness, and biophilia—attentive to everyday rhythms and intimate observation.
Hassan’s contribution to Familial is too easily reduced to diaristic tenderness. It is certainly tender. But what is critically significant is the way the work refuses event. The installation disperses the photographs rather than organising them around a central image or emotional climax. The installation does not operate through dispersion alone. Large-scale photographic fields anchor the space, while smaller framed images circulate around them, producing a tension between immersion and fragmentation. The viewer moves between these registers—held by the scale of certain images, then released into a dispersed constellation—preventing any stable hierarchy from forming. The dispersed wall produces a durational mode of viewing. The viewer does not encounter a singular, load-bearing picture and extrapolate from it. The viewer remains with a cluster of images whose importance lies in their cumulative relation. And crucially, that cumulative relation never resolves into a stable meaning. Duration here does not consolidate—it disperses further. The more images the viewer takes in, the less any single moment holds. This is the structural core of Hassan’s contribution: duration fails to stabilise because the photographs are not organised toward a terminus. They loop, repeat, return. There is no last word.
Hassan photographed her twin boys, Beau and Kai, over an extended period, building a sustained and evolving visual record of their lives. Tenderness and poetry shine through this personal and diaristic work. The images, taken from across a number of years, show Hassan as woman, daughter, mother, and wife—experiencing all these roles in joyous hues, in snatched moments of warmth and celebration. Yet the key point is structural rather than sentimental: the photographs are not organised around the decisive moment. They are organised around repetition, recurrence, and the visual residue of daily proximity. This repetition operates as a durational method, allowing meaning to accumulate without ever fully resolving into coherence. The images created in collaboration with her twin teenage sons become a testament to Hassan’s rare ability to meld poetry and image, tenderness and storytelling with such ease and power. The work is fundamentally collaborative, emerging through shared moments with her children rather than observational distance, positioning photography as a relational act rather than a documentary one.
Meaning does not settle in a single moment. It disperses across duration.
In Hassan’s work the viewer sees the woman, the daughter, the mother, and the wife experiencing all these roles in joyous hues, in snatched moments of warmth and celebration. These images become coloured, literally and figuratively, by Hassan’s passing in 2024; as such they resonate with pain, with strength, with resilience, and with the simplicity of a mother’s love for her children. This aligns her with a demanding lineage of intimate photography: Nan Goldin’s diaristic insistence, Emmet Gowin’s family work, Moyra Davey’s domestic attention. But Hassan’s images are notably less theatrical than Goldin’s and less formally idealising than Gowin’s. They remain low-key, anti-spectacular, attentive to the modesty of lived relation. These photographs will be long treasured for their demonstration of intimacy. Hassan’s visceral and tender connection to her children and community shines through in each frame; every image acts as a counterpoint to the heartaching loss that permeates the context of the work.
Her passing in September 2024 inevitably inflects the work’s reception. Yet the strongest reading resists reducing the work to retrospective poignancy. What matters is not simply that the pictures now carry the weight of loss, but that they already operated through a durational ethics of care. They do not monumentalise motherhood. They remain in the unresolved temporal texture of being with children. The photographs do not convert family into event; they allow it to remain process. Still, as noted earlier, the work’s proximity to conventional diaristic photography means it sits less comfortably in the exhibition’s anti-stabilising thesis than its neighbours do. That tension—between the beautiful and the destabilising—is not a weakness of the exhibition but a productive friction within it.
Wang: Equivalence
Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang is a Taiwanese artist whose long-term project The Mother as a Creator began in 2001. Starting in 2002, Wang began recording her own personal, familial history—a photograph produced at regular intervals, independent of event or occasion, of herself and her son. With height as a reference point, Wang found settings and scenarios where she and her son could be at the same height. Recording this systematic approach also revealed the subtle changes every year brought, both physically and in the mother-son relationship. The resulting collaborative series of self-portraits has allowed Wang to process the inequality and limitations placed on women, her own changed roles as artist and mother, and the life stories and moments she has shared with her son. The constraint is non-negotiable: the image is only made when equivalence can be physically constructed, turning the act of photographing into a problem of negotiation rather than observation.
This context matters enormously in Familial, because My Son and I at the Same Height is often misread as a clever serial premise whose charm lies in its simplicity. In fact, the work is structurally exacting. The repeated alignment of mother and son at the same height functions less as a playful gimmick than as a visible system of relational recalibration. Equality is not naturalised; it is staged. Chairs, posture, framing, bodily compensation—all become part of the image. The labour of maintaining the series is inseparable from its meaning. What is produced is not equality itself but a constructed equivalence, repeatedly staged against the irreversible asymmetry of growth and ageing.
Wang’s work gives the viewer a set of images that builds an archive, in retrospect, that allows for a process of reflection, and allows us to look forwards and backwards simultaneously. With the simple and playful gesture of positioning herself and her son at the same height in each image, Wang opens up conversations around masculinity, motherhood, equality, and the traditional roles and expectations imposed on women. The series teaches us that family is also a constantly evolving and unfolding experience; confronted with these linear and temporally organised snapshot images, we are reminded that we all grow and age, and that our familial roles morph and adapt over time. In the installation, the series unfolds linearly along the wall, producing a compressed temporal field in which the viewer reads the work both sequentially and at a glance, collapsing years of change into a single visual continuum.
Equality is not given. It is constructed, each time, against the strain of difference.
What is easily missed is that the series is not just about time passing. It is about the gendered work required to hold relation in visual form. The matter-of-fact captions, the accessible “we were here” logic, the family-album familiarity—these are precisely what make the work more rather than less rigorous. In Wang’s work the viewer sees the relationality and the interconnectedness that defines the relationship of this mother and her son, and it is clear that it ebbs and flows from one day to the next. The repetition and playfulness of the images, the idea that “anyone could do these,” invites the viewer to consider their own family album, and their own ways of visually documenting their lives. Wang combines her images with matter-of-fact captions that add an accessible and diaristic quality to the series.
In international terms, Wang’s series inevitably recalls Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters as a serial family archive of time, but its proposition is different. Nixon’s work is structured around the visual persistence of a sibling collective. Wang’s is structured around the repeated production of equivalence between unequal bodies under conditions of growth and ageing. The relation is not simply recorded. It is manufactured each time. That repeated manufacture gives the series its critical force. Time does not merely pass through the photographs. It exposes the strain within the system that attempts to contain it.
Varney: Archive
Abigail Varney is a Melbourne-based portrait and documentary photographer whose broader practice evolves from a sustained engagement with land, people, ecology, and the quiet, often overlooked narratives embedded within Australian life. She studied at Photography Studies College in Melbourne, completed an internship with Mary Ellen Mark, and has worked across portrait, documentary, and editorial contexts. This grounding matters. WILJUL—while intimate and deeply personal—emerges from a practice already attuned to the ethics of representation and the instability of how lives are pictured. Her work does not simply depict relationships; it interrogates the conditions under which they become visible.
WILJUL combines Varney’s contemporary photographs with archival photographs made by her father, William Varney, to construct a shifting portrait of her late mother. The title—a portmanteau of her parents’ first names—signals immediately that the work resists singularity. The mother is not presented as a fixed subject but as a figure produced through overlapping visual claims: father, daughter, memory, and loss. The archive here is not inherited intact. It is entered into, reworked, and unsettled.
What gives the installation its force is its refusal of a singular gaze. The archive is not positioned as a stable repository from which the mother might be recovered. Instead, it operates as a contested field. William Varney’s photographs remain active rather than supplementary; they do not recede into background context. The daughter’s images do not overwrite them. Nor do they align. What emerges instead is a multi-perspectival structure in which authorship is continually redistributed. The maternal figure does not consolidate into an image. It disperses across competing viewpoints.
Varney’s practice unfolds through layering, return, and reconstruction. Meaning does not reside in any single photograph but accumulates through adjacency and repetition. The oscillation between archival material and contemporary images produces a temporal tension in which past and present remain unresolved. The work does not seek to reconcile these temporalities. It holds them apart. In doing so, it allows memory to appear not as continuity but as interruption.
The archive does not preserve the past. It keeps it unstable and in motion.
This is where WILJUL exceeds the conventions of the personal archive. It does not preserve. It reactivates. The images do not stabilise the past; they reopen it. In the installation, the grid suggests order, but that order is immediately undermined by the heterogeneity of the images themselves—differences in scale, tone, subject, and authorship. The viewer is offered a structure, but not a resolution. The eye moves, returns, hesitates. No single image carries authority.
The installation demands a double reading. At a distance, the grid presents itself as a coherent archival structure, implying order and containment. As the viewer approaches, that coherence dissolves: differences in temporality, authorship, and visual language assert themselves, fracturing the system from within. The eye moves across the grid but cannot settle. What appears stable at the level of structure becomes unstable at the level of experience. This instability is intensified spatially. Opposing grids face one another, positioning the viewer between them. To look at one is to turn away from the other. The act of viewing becomes oscillatory, a continual shifting of attention across two competing image fields. The work cannot be held in a single glance. It must be navigated.
Placed in an international context, the work sits in dialogue with artists who mobilise the family archive as a site of fracture rather than continuity: Lebohang Kganye’s staged reanimations, Carmen Winant’s recompositional strategies, Laia Abril’s distributed image fields. Varney’s approach is quieter, less declarative, but no less rigorous. Where others emphasise rupture, she works through accumulation. The instability remains, but it emerges through care rather than confrontation.
In Familial, WILJUL refuses closure. The grid does not resolve into a portrait. It remains provisional. The past is not secured within the photograph; it is continually reassembled through the act of viewing. What the work ultimately proposes is not that memory fails, but that it cannot exist as a fixed image. It must be constructed again and again, each time differently.
The Limit
To conclude Familial by restating that family is complex, or that photography captures memory, would be to misread the exhibition entirely. What the works collectively insist upon is not the depth of familial feeling but the inadequacy of the image as a structure capable of containing it.
Across the exhibition, photography is not simply used. It is tested.
Kenton disperses the image into textile and cultural material, showing that relational proximity is mediated by inherited structures that cannot be flattened into representation. The camera becomes a mediator, allowing mother and daughter to appear as collaborators—but only across the fabric of tradition itself.
Batniji exposes the image as dependent on fragile infrastructures, where intimacy is routed through compression, delay, and interruption. The green glitch is not an aesthetic decision. It is the colour of separation under siege.
Sancari pushes typology beyond its epistemological limits, revealing repetition not as knowledge but as the persistence of absence. Her dressed-up strangers do not become the father. They become the evidence that he cannot be recovered.
Hassan refuses the authority of the decisive moment, situating meaning within duration and the ethics of attention. Her dispersed walls do not monumentalise motherhood. They remain in the unresolved texture of being with children—though not without brushing against the legibility the exhibition elsewhere resists. Her duration does not consolidate meaning; it disperses it, leaving the viewer with a loop rather than a line.
Wang constructs a serial system that reveals its own strain, exposing the labour required to sustain relational equivalence over time. The repeated staging of equal height becomes a record of everything that unequal growth makes visible.
Varney reconfigures the archive as a site of multiplicity, where memory is not preserved but continually reassembled through competing gazes. Her father’s images and her own do not reconcile. They keep the mother distributed, unfixed, held in irresolution rather than resolved through it.
The photograph does not secure relation. It reveals its limits.
This impossibility is not a failure of the artists, nor of photography as a medium. It is the exhibition’s central insight. Familial relation—structured by time, absence, cultural expectation, memory, and loss—exceeds the formal and conceptual limits of the photographic image. To attempt to contain it is to expose those limits. As Boetker-Smith has observed of Sancari’s search for meaning through the book, “Perhaps we find it, perhaps we don’t.” The exhibition does not resolve that perhaps. It insists upon it.
What distinguishes Familial from other exhibitions that make similar claims is its insistence on grounding these conditions in lived relation. The works do not illustrate theoretical positions. They embody them. Photography here does not stabilise relation; it exposes the conditions through which relation is continually negotiated and never secured. Rather than serving as a neutral container of memory, the image becomes a site where cultural, technological, and temporal forces converge and remain unresolved. In this sense, the photograph extends beyond the frame into a network of relations, where meaning is distributed rather than fixed. The archive, as it appears here, does not function as a stable repository but as a system in which images accumulate without resolving into coherence. And where those systems begin to break down, the image itself degrades—fragmented, delayed, or interrupted—carrying the marks of its own instability. Yet Familial is not a theoretical demonstration. It is a meditation on love and longing—and on the limits of what the photograph can hold of either.
The exhibition leaves the viewer without resolution, and this is precisely its strength. There is no singular image that can stand for the whole, no narrative that can contain the works, no conclusion that can stabilise what has been encountered. Instead, the viewer exits with a heightened awareness of the photograph’s limits—not simply its inability to hold what it represents, but its exposure of that impossibility. The healing potential of photography, which Varney’s work gestures toward, is not a matter of closure. It is a matter of continuing to look, to return, to reassemble.
Outside again, the images on the gallery façade are encountered differently. No longer read as introductory or promotional, they appear as extensions of the exhibition’s central condition: fragments, reflections, partial presences that cannot be separated from the world they inhabit. The camera does not fail to hold what we love. It shows that it never fully could.
Exhibition Details
Title: Familial
Artists: Taysir Batniji, EJ Hassan, Nur Aishah Kenton, Mariela Sancari, Abigail Varney, Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang
Curator: Daniel Boetker-Smith
Presented by: Centre for Contemporary Photography
Venue: Town Hall Gallery
Dates: 11 February – 25 April 2026
Location: Hawthorn Arts Centre, 360 Burwood Road, Hawthorn VIC 3122, Australia
Opening Hours: Monday–Friday: 9am–5pm; Saturday: 12pm–4pm
Admission: Free
