Second Generation Collective – Avareh & Found

Second Generation is a group of Perth artists and creatives who are the children of the first generation of Iranians who experienced and navigated cultural and religious persecution during and since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Second Generation hopes to encourage those who were displaced, and the generations that have come after, to document and share their stories through different artistic mediums.

Avareh & Found is a series of four workshops open to all members of the Iranian-Australian community and those with close ties to that community. Participants will develop creative pieces and stories, which they may later wish to share with the wider community during an exhibition which celebrates their collective stories.

The workshops will culminate in a final immersive exhibition experience reflecting the different experiences of displacement, migration, and resettlement through a poetic and non-linear audio-visual installation. Through a series of immersive spaces, ‘home’, ‘home lost’, ‘reflection’ and ‘healing’, each space critically and emotionally expresses the notions of belonging, loss, grief, identity and resilience. During the month of March 2021, which is also the month where the community celebrates Persian New Year and Bahá’í New Year, there will a collective of live performances presented by participants and collaborators of the project in conjunction with a multi-channel audio-visual installation.

Second Generation hopes that through The Arts, the community will be able to address collective traumas, bridge the intergenerational gap and confront the dichotomy of identity; the push and pull of the acceptance or rejection of culture whilst acknowledging the journey of what the first generation went through for the second generation to be here today.

Photo by Omid Eshraghian