q/g[h]ALBI: A Collective Process

Exhibition

10 June

Prita Tina Yeganeh, Sirena Varma, Lamisse Hamouda, Aleea Monsour
25 July - 29 August  2026

q/g[h]ALBI is a creative platform by Sirena Varma and Prita Tina Yeganeh that explores the politics of place, diasporic identity, and collective futures of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) peoples—across their homelands and the settler-lands they inhabit. For this exhibition callout, q/g[h]ALBI is collaborating with creatives Lamisse Hamouda and Aleea Monsour.

The Map of Nearness is an evolving, interactive site-responsive installation developed through a year of gathering, conversation and collective-making between Aleea, Lamisse, Prita and Sirena.

Emerging from discussions circulating loss, isolation, fracture, yearning, (re)connection and intimacy within diasporic life in Australia, and informed by their guesthood in Magan-djin (Brisbane), the artists turn toward reclaiming cultural coordinates guiding guesthood, kinship, gathering and collective care. Weaving and embroidery practices, drawn from their Lebanese, Egyptian, Iranian and Palestinian heritages, merge to operate as the central visual languages of the installation. Woven, stitched, tangled, broken and unfinished, these gestures map displacement, transmission, inheritances, paths forward, and entry points for continuing the conversation.

By entering the exhibition, visitors are welcomed into the conversation, and into relation, through an invitation to contribute to the work. As they thread in their responses, visitors move from passive observers to active participants; their actions mapping them into the growing cartography of relationality held by The Map of Nearness.

The Map of Nearness deliberately refuses resolve, favouring reflection through process and participation. The work weaves audiences into a living conversation that explores how belonging is made, instead of identified; a critical shifting from the declaration of ‘this is what it is’ to the question of ‘what do we do with what it is?’

Left to right (Aleea Monsour, Lamisse Hamouda, Prita Tina Yeganeh, Sirena Varma)

ARTISTS

Aleea Monsour:
Aleea Monsour (she/her) is an independent artist, dramaturg and community theatre practitioner based in Brisbane. Her practice centres theatre and the arts as agents for social change, with a particular focus on amplifying the voices of women, young people and marginalised communities.

She currently tutors a creative industries subject at QUT and has undertaken residencies with ASHTAR Theatre in Ramallah (2017) and Blast Theory in Brighton, UK (2016). Aleea has worked across performance, facilitation and production, including as Project Manager for Maryborough Regional Council’s youth ensemble Stuff and Nonsense, and as a collaborating artist on A Library for the End of the World with Metro Arts.

Lamisse Hamouda:
Lamisse (she/her) is a writer, poet and interdisciplinary artist working across text and performance. Lamisse's debut novel, 'The Shape of Dust' won the National Biography of the Year Award in 2024. Lamisse has published across a range of platforms and anthologies; her recent works include published poetry in the Sweatshop anthology 'Ritual: Australian-Muslim Poetry', and her poetry series 'Griefscape' - produced in collaboration with musician Han Reardon-Smith for issue 48 of Runway Journal. As a workshop facilitator and narrative therapist (in-training), Lamisse has delivered her creative writing workshops to writers and artists across Australia and Europe. She was a 2025 Keesing Studio Writer-in-Residence in Paris, and is currently completing her Masters in Narrative Therapy & Community Work at the University of Melbourne.

Prita Tina Yeganeh:
Prita Tina Yeganeh (she/her) is a multidisciplinary visual artist of Iranian ancestry. Her practice is shaped by her lived experience as a refugee-migrant, her training in environmental engineering and ecological systems, and experimental research into Iranian heritage crafts.

Working across installation, printmaking, textile, moving image, and participatory practice, Yeganeh’s work emerges from storytelling, familial narratives, and community exchange. Drawing on Iranian sensibilities and Indigenous knowledge systems, she explores the emotional and physical geographies of migration, identity, and placemaking, with a focus on grief, care, and healing in diasporic life.

Alongside exhibitions, Yeganeh leads community-centred projects and co-founded Magan-djin Creatives for Palestine in 2024.

Sirena Varma:
Sirena Varma (she/her) is a multidisciplinary designer and artist working across the visual arts, graphic design and exhibition design from Beirut, based in Magan-djin. Through collaboration and co-creation, her work engages cultural care, collective memory and visual storytelling. Her practice has been featured in Beirut Design Week, Dutch Design Week, Frame Magazine and the Institute of Modern Art.

Her interdisciplinary praxis is shaped by collaborative making and inspiration drawn from her Lebanese, Palestinian, German and Indian heritage and lived experience of migration. Guided by a commitment to cultural care and resistance through art, Sirena co-founded Magan-djin Creatives for Palestine and Blatt & Matonelli, a collaborative tile-based practice reimagining traditional tile-making.