Art Forum

Joyce Joumaa is a visual artist who works in Beirut, Montreal, and Amsterdam. After growing up in Tripoli, Lebanon, she pursued her studies in Film at Concordia University. Working primarily with video, Joumaa’s work engages with histories shaped by conflict and crisis while specifically investigating the phenomenology of political performance, often rooted in her native Lebanon or diasporic experiences. 

Through documentary and experimental filmmaking, archival research, and photography, her practice attempts to create narratives that reimagine our relationship to past events, historical figures, or emblematic sites, examining how they continue to act upon us in the present. Joumaa has exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, E-flux screening room, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the 60th Venice Biennial, and the 35th edition of Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Plein Sud Centre D’exposition, and Eli Kerr Gallery. She received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, the 2023 Plein Sud Award, and a 2025 FoundWork Prize finalist.

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Moorina Bonini is a proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta Dhulunyagen family clan of Ulupna and the Yorta Yorta, Wurundjeri, and Wiradjuri Briggs/McCrae family. As an artist of Aboriginal and Italian heritage, her practice critiques and disrupts the Eurocentric frameworks that shape institutional perceptions of Indigenous identity. Grounded in Indigenous Knowledge systems, Bonini’s work challenges colonial narratives, re-centres Aboriginal perspectives, and examines the intersections of culture, history, and representation.

Bonini is particularly interested in practice-led research as a method for interrogating the western binaries and categorisations imposed upon Aboriginal peoples, both historically and in contemporary society. Through her work, she examines the ways in which Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and being resist and transcend these imposed structures, creating space for self-determined representations of Aboriginal identities and experiences.

Working across installation, moving image and cultural practice, Bonini has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at ACMI, The Shed (New York), City Gallery Wellington (NZ), Gertrude Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Recent major commissions include TarraWarra Biennial 2025: We Are Eagles, and RISING Festival (2025). She is currently a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary (2024–2026).

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Anu Kumar is a photographic artist living and working in Naarm/ Melbourne. Kumar who works primarily with medium-format photography, frequently uses her practice as a way to understand her identity as a woman born in India and raised in Australia, interrogating themes of displacement and diaspora. Kumar’s photographic observations of everyday family life in her hometown of Kavi Nagar in the northwestern city of Ghaziabad in India acknowledge the deep strength of familial ties unfractured by migration, the preservation of inherited gestures and traditions, and the importance of archiving as a means of safeguarding personal and collective histories. Kumar’s work was shown in Melbourne Now at the national Gallery of Victoria and If we could only take the time: contemporary Australian photography at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Her photography has been published in the New York Times and Vogue Italia. Her first volume of photographs was published in 2022 by Perimeter Editions, with a second volume in preparation.

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Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is a Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author/editor of scholarly books on AIDS including AIDS TV (Duke, 1995) and  We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (with Ted Kerr, Duke, 2022); fake (and real) documentaries (The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Documentary, with Alisa Lebow, 2015) and Really Fake (with Nishant Shah and Ganaele Langlois, Minnesota, 2021); YouTube (Learning From YouTube, MIT Press, 2013); and Black lesbian filmmaking (with Yvonne Welbon, Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of African-American Lesbian Filmmaking, Duke 2018).  

She is the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy as well as the feature fake documentaries The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). She writes about her cultural and political commitments in scholarly and more public platforms including  Hyperallergic,  BOMB,  MS,  X-tra, and Lambda Literary Review. Her edited anthology of community-produced poetry about Fake News, My Phone Lies to Me was published in Fall 2022 by punctum press.

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Nathan Beard is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, video and photography currently based in Narrm/Melbourne. His work draws from his Australian-Thai heritage, exploring family history, archives and broad signifiers of ‘Thainess’ to reveal the porous influences which shape the commercial and historical production of culture. Through this agile collision of references and materials, Beard’s work speaks to the complexities surrounding value, authenticity and diasporic identity.

Recent exhibition highlights include 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength (2026), TarraWarra Biennial 2025: We Are Eagles, TarraWarra Museum of Art (2025) and A Puzzlement, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2023) and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2022). In 2024 he was the recipient of the Debra Porch Award and winner of the Darebin Art Prize. He was part of the Gertrude Studio Program from 2023-25. Nathan is represented by AVA, Boorloo/Perth, and FUTURES, Narrm/Melbourne.

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Commemorating the recent restoration of the Honour Board, Dr Bronwyn Hughes OAM discusses students from VCA (formerly National Gallery Art School 1867-1973) who served during WWI.

https://www.anvam.org.au/ngas?srsltid=AfmBOooupugNK7wZoSiLZfG54fYN0D4mydvSbfo3VbjSb43hYB_0KOa9

Dr Bronwyn Hughes OAM is an art historian who has researched Australia’s stained glass for more than forty years. Prior to her ‘retirement’, she taught glass studies at Monash University, Holmesglen Institute and the University of Melbourne. Through the not-for-profit organisation, GLAAS Inc she supports glass education for the next generation of artists, glass for contemporary architecture and conservation of historic glass. Her book, Lights Everlasting: Australia’s Commemorative Stained Glass from the Boer War to Vietnam (2023) was followed by her involvement in a documentary on war service and sacrifice, Let the Light Shine (2024), and a podcast on the Vietnam Veterans Commemorative Walk at Seymour, A Memory in Light (2025). Dr Hughes’ latest project is a book in conjunction with Dr Alison Inglis, LUMINOUS: John Orval and Modernist Stained Glass in Australia due for release in 2026.

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Simone Slee makes work that has its origins in sculpture. She produces installations, photographs, videos and sculptural objects that often engage the body and have a performance potential. Her practice investigates concepts of abfunction; a term she coined as a generative move away from concepts of function within the production and effect of an artwork. In her practice, this has led to the surprising and unexpected functions and effects of objects or actions. At other times, the effects of absurdity, embarrassment, instability and endurance have been generated through the artwork. Space-private, public and institutional, provides a field in which these sculptural gestures are often performed. Slee completed a PhD from the University of Melbourne where she was awarded The Chancellors Prize for Excellence in the PhD Thesis (2018). She has attended the Staedelschule, Frankfurt am Main as a guest student of Professor Ayse Erkmen (2004-6), after being awarded the Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship (2004). Her current solo exhibition Light Time at Heide Museum of Modern Art explores notions of lightness and weight, pressure, compression and uplift, and the embedded sense of time in what it takes to hold things up or together. Simone Slee is Head of Art at the Victorian College of the Arts.

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Due to unforeseen circumstances, this Art Forum session has been cancelled. Lauren Burrow will speak in Art Forum in Semester 2 2026.

Lauren Burrow is an artist and educator who is a current Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship recipient and a candidate in the PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, for her research Private property is an environmental threat. Through sculpture and installation, Burrow uses scrap materials including glass, plastic, and water to investigate flows between the urban and the rural, the individual and the collective, the social and the ecological. Burrow graduated with a Masters of Fine Art (Sculpture) from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, New York, in 2019. She has held exhibitions at PLI, Munich (2022), Holden Garage, Berlin (2021), and TCB Art Inc, Melbourne (2019) and her work has been included in group exhibitions at LaTrobe Art Institute (2023), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (2023), the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2021), and Hessel Museum of Art, New York (2021).

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Ruth Höflich is a visual artist working in moving image and photography born in Munich and currently based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work as been screened and exhibited internationally including most recently at Rencontres International Paris/Berlin, National Gallery of Victoria, Gertrude Contemporary, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Images Festival, Pravo Ljudski Film Festival, Art Gallery of New South Wales. She was recently a research fellow at Powerhouse Museum Sydney where she is developing a new film. She holds an MFA from Bard College, New York.

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