Collective Grief

A path through shared sorrow and resilience

DADAA Gallery, Fremantle, Western Australia

16 May - 19 July 2025

Artists: Dr Rusaila Bazlamit, Nicole Barakat, Claire B. Bushby, Nastaran Ghadiri, Zara Mollaei, Zali Morgan, Dr Elnaz Sheshgelani

Curated by Nastaran Ghadiri

“Grief is like the ocean; it comes in waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.” Vicki Harrison

I was told to move on, I was expected to move on, but one thing I learnt through my personal journey with grief is that: there is no “moving on”. Grief is a space we inhabit. A space where the personal and the collective histories intertwin, each deepening the other. I grieve my sister who passed in 2013 and my father who passed in 2021 every time I grieve for my homeland. My father, the Palestinian blood in me, survived the Nakba to then live all his life away from Palestine. He died without having the chance to return nor to be hugged by the lands of his ancestors. Grief from the personal to the collective.

Every face that I see crying, every person I witness collapsing underneath the unimaginable burden of loss and every soul I see lost in the darkness reminds me of me. There is an inescapable vicerality to witnessing all this pain. This is how the personal collides with the collective. A sense of knowing, a true realisation that makes the pain of others, your pain too. Grief becomes another way where we can speak our truths.

Grief is not a wound that time can mend rather it is an emergence of unexpressed love, a living archive of memory and resistance. Collective grief holds within it the threads of connection. It teaches us to hold tenderness next to devastation. It reminds us that mourning can be an act of resistance and remembrance and an act of defiance against those who seek to render our suffering invisible.

At the heart of our collective grief is a continuation of love. Love that insists on being seen, heard and honoured. A love which is wholeheartedly intertwined with pain. A love which is resilient enough to imagine a better world. A love which can guide us as we move forward. This exhibition is a testament to that collective grief and its immense expression of love.

Dr. Rusaila Bazlamit

This exhibition aimed to explore the multifaceted nature of collective grief and its profound impact on societies, cultures, and individuals. It brought together artists shaped by displacement, loss, and longing, creating a space where grief was acknowledged and honoured. Though each artist carried different histories, their sorrows spoke to one another. We were connected not only by loss, but also by love for our homelands, for justice, and for each other. Speaking of grief is not an act of despair, but a quiet form of resistance. In remembering, we refuse to forget. The works invited reflection on how grief bound us: to each other, to our histories, and to the futures we still dare to imagine. Here, grief was not the end of the story, but the beginning of a shared remembering and perhaps, a shared healing.