Healing Practices

How do we navigate the trauma that is embedded in place, and in turn ourselves?

In seeking to respond to this question, Healing Practices developed as an exhibition and publication, engaging with the non-linear nature of past trauma and related healing.

The initial exhibition, shown at Bundoora Homestead in 2019, transposed historical narratives of the exhibition site – a home, psychiatric facility and now an art centre, all imbued with colonial legacy – onto the site of the body. Displaying a suite of works that acknowledge the non-linear nature of healing and trauma by engaging with this durational lived experience directly in form, content and style.

Documenting and re-engaging with the original exhibition premise, this accompanying publication extends the bounds of the exhibition beyond the site, in a consideration of terrestrial trauma, personal returns, code-switching and liminal living. These responses, presented here alongside archival material of Bundoora Repatriation Hospital and documentation of the exhibited work, offer further insight into the links between the curatorial premise and the site itself, but also a consideration of the varying ways in which trauma becomes embedded, interwoven and can be navigated, lived with and overcome.

Texts by Bahar Sayed, Chantelle Mitchell, Hanann Al Daqqa, Jaxon Waterhouse and Rachel Ciesla. Artists include Duha Ali, Justine Youssef, Katie West, Stanislava Pinchuk and Zaiba Khan

Healing Practices
Published by Heart of Hearts, Melbourne, 2019
Edited by Rachel Ciesla and Jaxon Waterhouse
Designed by Ziga Testen
Supported by ST. ALi, Melbourne
Softcover, 40 pages, 20 x 28 cm
ISBN: 978-0-6487040-0-3