Whispers From The Floodplain

Ara Dolatian

2 - 26 Jul 2025

There are stories buried in the earth. Ara Dolatian brings these layered histories, myths, losses, and lives to the surface. In Whispers from the Floodplain, showing at James Makin Gallery in Naarm/Melbourne from July 2 to 26, 2025, Dolatian transforms ceramic, clay, and glistening glaze into vessels of complexity. It’s less an exhibition than an excavation of myth, place, and self. As a diasporic artist who migrated from Baghdad, Dolatian is known for his immersive and materially sensitive practice. In this latest body of work, he draws on Mesopotamian artifacts, literature, and ecology to construct imagined relics. Crafting these sculptural forms that speak to both ancient civilisations and contemporary diasporic realities.

“Much of my recent work is inspired by the ancient city of Erbil and its Citadel—an enduring, stratified site layered with millennia of habitation. This geography becomes a metaphor for heterotopia: a space where multiple histories and imagined futures coexist. My ceramic surfaces reflect this—layered, ruptured, and embedded with memory”
- ARA DOLATIAN, 2025

There is a deep reverence running through the work, not only for place, but for voice. The exhibition is haunted by Enheduanna, the high priestess and poet from ancient Sumer, widely considered the world’s first known author. Her hymns to power, divinity and womanhood echo in Dolatian’s forms, which feel ceremonial and otherworldly, as though uncovered from a future ruin.

These are not nostalgic works. Dolatian doesn’t reconstruct the past but reimagines it. Cratered, blackened, and gilded in places with molten gold, his sculptures appear as though they’ve survived the hardship of this world and possibly the end of the world. Their surfaces shimmer with a tension between decay and divinity, walking the line between a sacred artefact and looted treasure. They do not invite easy interpretation but ask you to feel their presence in the space and share a moment together.

Dolatian builds not monuments but portable altars. Objects of movement, survival and adaptation. They are heterotopias in themselves: sites of rupture and healing, heavy with the weight of cultural memory yet light enough to carry with you. Choosing not to present literal depictions but forms that embody the resilience and the experience of diasporic communities.

This isn’t the first time Dolatian’s voice has resonated across the contemporary art scene. His work was featured in Melbourne Now at the NGV, included in Craft Victoria’s Melbourne Design Week, and shown at Sydney’s Liverpool Powerhouse. A finalist in numerous national prizes and the winner of the 2024 Bundoora Homestead Art Prize. He’s fast becoming a vital voice in Australian contemporary practice.

In Whispers from the Floodplain, that voice is quiet, but persistent. It doesn’t shout, but it stays with you. A reminder that even in ruin, something sacred remains.

BY DEVON CAMPBELL