i cast a larynx: 138 Gallery

Ara Dolatian

18 - 28 Sep 2025

With work by Lara Chamas, Eric Della Bosca, Ara Dolatian, & Stefa Panoschi Curated by Thomas Stoddard

138 Gallery

i cast a larynx is a group exhibition that explores self-generated and recontextualised memories through affect-driven artefacts, featuring works by Naarm/Melbourne artists Lara Chamas, Eric Della Bosca, Ara Dolatian, and Stefa Panoschi.

This exhibition would focus on objects and images from artists that function as fictitious memory-making, self-mythologising, and artefacts of personal transmutation. In the making of a personal mythology, contrivance is not a pejorative, but an essential ingredient. The artefacts that result from this mythology-making produce a more-real-than-real autobiography, where one’s reinterpretation of history carries the same weight as our hegemonic reality. Queerness, family histories, past cultural legacies, and perceptions of place all intertwine into affect-driven practices, with each artist attempting to gather the inherited dust of the past, and give it the form of the self.

This iteration of the exhibition concept centres on sculptural practices, teasing the relationships between the malleable memory and the malleable earth. Time and pressure mould it into new shapes, all with the essence of the original material, but expressing something new. Through sculptural practice, this kindred materiality between earth and memory makes space for critical dialogues to emerge through the examination of personal memory. The banal and mundane detritus of our daily lives — dust, dirt, hair, receipts, unwanted gifts, sentimental symbols, accidental mementos — can be transmuted by hands into a self-determined personal archive. They are not narratives of a literal chronology of life, but rather evidence of reinterpreted inheritances, intercontinental connections, feelings, desires, critiques, and bodily presences.

Ara Dolatian’s clay works draw from the legacies of the past, his from Iraq and ancient Mesopotamia, and reimagines them as relics and treasures of a place that exists within the mythology and memory of Dolatian himself, its own sacred country. Dolatian’s essay for his recent exhibition, Whispers From The Floodplain (2025), links his concept with his material approach, reading “the tactile instability of clay mirrors the fragility of cultural memory.” Rather than replicate the past, Dolatian embraces that mnemonic fragility and reinterprets history through a convergence of “myth, place, and identity.” He contrasts this with the fetishistic historical gaze of the present, creating an alternate reality of treasures that acts as a more-real-than-real heterotopic space. It is inhabited by the self-forged memories of the artist and those who also pass through his sculpted gates.

This exhibition will take place at 138 Gallery, a small non-profit arts organisation established in 2021, located on bustling Lygon St. Past exhibiting artists include Cait Foord, Nina Gilbert, Lou Hubbard, Joseph Doggett Williams, and Johanna van der Linden, and soon to be exhibiting Nick Currie, Tom Pendergast, and more.

138 Lygon St, Brunswick East