Group Show - Identity: Quiet Acts, Strong Voices
Group Show - Identity: Quiet Acts, Strong Voices
Exhibiting artists: Ramak Bamzar, Bronwyn Kidd & Nani Puspasari
Exhibition Essay – Identity: Quiet Acts, Strong Voices
Oscar Wilde once said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” For artists today, the idea of “being yourself” can be a challenging and complex undertaking.
In a world where ideas about identity, expression, and freedom are constantly shifting, the question of what it means to be an artist—and whose stories get to be told—remains vital.
Artistic practice is shaped by many forces: including culture, age, lived experience, relationships, gender. These influences intersect in ways that can be surprising, enlightening, and sometimes deeply personal… informing not only what an artist creates, but also how and why they create it.
This exhibition brings together three artists whose image-making is a way to explore and express these layered connections, with each artist offering a distinct lens through which to see and understand the world.
Nani Puspasari blends vivid colour, whimsical forms, and cultural references to explore migration, memory, and belonging. Grounded in her Chinese-Indonesian heritage, her work balances playful surfaces with deeper emotional undercurrents. While her figures may appear humorous or light-hearted, closer viewing reveals nostalgia and dislocation. There is resilience too, as her practice inhabits the space between past and present, using visual storytelling to reshape her own sense of self.
Ramak Bamzar creates staged photographic portraits that blur the lines between performance, fashion, and self-representation. Drawing on her experience growing up in Iran and now living in Australia, her work explores constraint and freedom—how identity is shaped both by internal desires and external expectations. The title of her series, Rebel Femmes (2023) sends us a message of strength. The simple act of wearing denim jeans, something most Australians would never think twice about, was a perilous act when the artist was a teenager living in Iran. Bamzar’s rebellious photographs, despite their intensity, retain a sense of gentleness and femininity. This tension reflects the complexities of self-expression in the face of cultural boundaries.
Bronwyn Kidd draws on her long career in photography and her feminist influences to honour lineage, ritual, and intergenerational memory. Through Her Breath (2022)—created in collaboration with choreographer Carol Brown—celebrates ancestral breath and the role of women as custodians of embodied memories. Inspired by the philosophy of Luce Irigaray, Kidd and Brown reframe a genealogy of breath-inspired movement from Gertrude Bodenwieser and the Bess Mensendieck system.
This collaborative spirit is carried through into Kidd’s recent series Sea Lion Sisters (2024), where she again works with Brown to explore intimacy, resilience, and kinship between women. Drawing on the twisting, protective movements of sea lion mothers, the project unfolds within a luminous set evoking mother-of-pearl, a symbolic feminine space of shelter and creation. The dancers’ movements—crossing and recrossing in cyclical rhythms—embody Irigaray’s idea of women’s connectedness as a source of strength and creativity, while costumes by Virginia Dowzer and Amanda May’s nacre-inspired staging extend this energy into a theatrical, sensorial environment. Together, the work honours the deep physical empathy of sisterhood, blending photographic experimentation with choreography to reclaim femininity, beauty, and shared strength as powerful, generative forces.
Together, these three artists, through dance, narrative, fashion, and moments of play, explore what it means to create art when identity is part of the conversation. What holds them all together is a unique view of their world and a level of determination to do it their own way.
Curated by Jenny Port (2025)
Identity: Quiet Acts, Strong Voices
3 Sept – 31 Oct 2025
Ground floor,
36 Wellington Street
Collingwood
Event link
The Artwork
The Garden of Earthly Mischief (2023)
Diptych Painting
acrylic on 2-panel canvases
total size 234cm x 117cm
The Artwork
Playdates for Grownups (2024)
acrylic on canvas
106.7 x 106.7 cm
Exhibition view
Photo courtesy of