Maki Ogawa, Naveed Farro, Keiran Molaeb, Devika Bilimoria, Thang Do, Johanna van der Linden, Alexandra Kumala and Jacob Kotzee
House of Ghosts
26
November 2025
26
Nov
2025
17
Jan 2026
House of Ghosts
Maki Ogawa, Naveed Farro, Keiran Molaeb, Devika Bilimoria, Thang Do, Johanna van der Linden, Alexandra Kumala and Jacob Kotzee
26
November 2025
26
November
2025
17
January 2026
In Celtic cosmology, sacred groves were living thresholds. They weren’t places you climbed upward toward the divine or descended downward into an eternal inferno. Instead, they were understood as side-doors: quiet openings into a world that ran parallel to ours. The Otherworld wasn’t imagined as heaven or underworld; it was just beside us, touching our world at certain edges. These spaces acted as sanctuaries, courts, ritual sites, and portals for encountering the unseen. But they weren’t monumental. They were earthly spaces - of roots, soil, leaves, air. The sacred was encountered through the texture of the world itself.
This idea (that the spiritual lives alongside us, not above us) also moves through this exhibition. House of Ghosts presents a vision of the sacred that is grounded, bodily, sensory. Together, the artists explore the psychic, spatial, and somatic registers of contemporary devotion. Their works stay close to the earthly plane, asking how faith, ritual, and devotion function here, now, in the messy, hybrid, highly mediated present. A sanctuary not of ascension but of coexistence. A world overlapping ours.
Image | Jacob Kotzee, Leni, 2025, oil on canvas 55 × 40 cm
In Celtic cosmology, sacred groves were living thresholds. They weren’t places you climbed upward toward the divine or descended downward into an eternal inferno. Instead, they were understood as side-doors: quiet openings into a world that ran parallel to ours. The Otherworld wasn’t imagined as heaven or underworld; it was just beside us, touching our world at certain edges. These spaces acted as sanctuaries, courts, ritual sites, and portals for encountering the unseen. But they weren’t monumental. They were earthly spaces - of roots, soil, leaves, air. The sacred was encountered through the texture of the world itself.
This idea (that the spiritual lives alongside us, not above us) also moves through this exhibition. House of Ghosts presents a vision of the sacred that is grounded, bodily, sensory. Together, the artists explore the psychic, spatial, and somatic registers of contemporary devotion. Their works stay close to the earthly plane, asking how faith, ritual, and devotion function here, now, in the messy, hybrid, highly mediated present. A sanctuary not of ascension but of coexistence. A world overlapping ours.
Image | Jacob Kotzee, Leni, 2025, oil on canvas 55 × 40 cm
Maki Ogawa
Maki Ogawa is a Japanese–Australian artist based in Eora/Sydney. Working across drawing, painting, and more recently installation, her practice reflects on the ambiguous and shifting nature of bicultural identity. She explores how symbols and motifs - particularly ropes, rocks, and grids -can reveal the tensions and harmonies between cultural frameworks. Through these visual languages, Maki investigates sacred spaces, the role of language, and the interplay between Eastern and Western modes of thinking. Her work embraces hybridity as a generative space, using it to create new ways of understanding and to examine how we navigate, negotiate, and construct our identities.
Naveed Farro
Naveed Farro is an artist and filmmaker based in Narrm (Melbourne), Australia. He is currently a candidate for a Master of Fine Arts at Monash University’s Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture (MADA), and works as a Sessional Academic teaching Film and Media Studies at the same institution.
Naveed's professional experience spans moving-image design and post-production. He has worked as a Moving Image Designer for the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and in post-production roles at VICE Media.
Keiran Molaeb
Keiran Molaeb is a queer Lebanese artist whose practice explores cultural, interpersonal and familial connections. His work seeks to honour memory and celebrate the rich diversity of his heritage, creating a visual language that pays tribute to the people, places and histories that shape his identity.
Working primarily in portraiture, Keiran approaches each painting as a kind of ‘family portrait'. His subjects are chosen with care, selected for the significance they hold in his life, and rendered through a slow, deliberate process that becomes an act of dedication and love.
Rooted in storytelling, his practice explores the idea of ‘cultural roots’, reflecting on how connections stretch, intertwine and persist across borders. His paintings are created on Lebanese cedar and olive wood sourced from his father’s home country and prepared by hand by his grandfather. By grounding each work in this material lineage, Keiran wants to make ensure that every element (medium, subject and process) remains connected to the culture he commemorates and celebrates.
Thang Do
Thang Do is a queer Vietnamese-born artist based in Melbourne whose performances and installations explore humanity’s attraction to spectacle as a way to escape, hope and imagine new possibilities. Drawing on the tensions between Vietnam’s unresolved passages into modernity and the Western pursuit of the “Australian dream,” Thang’s work examines the emotional and cultural negotiations of migrant life.
Using domestic materials such as paper, foil and glitter, Thang creates embellished vessels and altar-like installations that merge spiritual symbolism with bureaucratic realities. Works including Department of 2nd Home Affairs highlight the anxieties and aspirations shaped by visa systems, cultural inheritance and social precarity. Through these hybrid forms, Thang invites viewers into a space where desire, identity and transformation co-exist.
Johanna van der Linden
Johanna van der Linden is a multi disciplinary artist from Naarm (Melbourne), with an ongoing interest in materiality, Catholicism, upbringing, shame and representations of the female body. Engaging with concepts around feminist new materialisms, Johanna uses materials such as latex, steel, wax, soap and family heirlooms as a point of departure in her practice which spans sculpture, installation and printmaking. Johanna uses forging, welding, casting and printing techniques to create forms and surfaces which disrupt the functionality and reverence targeted at Catholic symbolism as processes which de-sacralise and de-formalise. She is interested in the relationships between form, materiality and space, and how tensions and slippages between the sacred and profane can be manipulated, broken and re-made.She received her B.A. from Australian Catholic University, and an Honours (First Class) in Fine Arts from RMIT university. She is currently studying towards a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
Alexandra Kumala
Alexandra Kumala is a Jakarta-born filmmaker and writer whose work explores the untranslatable and inexpressible within Indonesian identity. Drawing on her Tionghoa-Peranakan heritage and a life lived across continents, she uses symbolism, metaphor and nontraditional forms to examine shifting borders, histories and power. Her films and essays foreground marginalised voices and speak to anyone who has felt silenced, erased or caught between worlds.
Jacob Kotzee
Jaco Kotzee is a Perth-based artist whose painting practice explores the tension between legibility and ambiguity. Reworking film stills, media images and found photographs, Kotzee dissolves familiar motifs to question how national identities and cultural memories are constructed. His paintings suspend recognisable imagery into states of uncertainty, opening space for new interpretations of unresolved histories. Kotzee holds a BFA (Honours, First Class) from Curtin University and has exhibited in solo and group shows across Perth, with upcoming residencies at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and Takt Berlin.
Devika Bilmoria
Devika Bilimoria is a London-based artist raised in Naarm/Melbourne whose X-disciplinary practice spans performance, dance, video, photography, drawing and installation. Drawing from Bharatanatyam, Odissi, theatre and live art, their work explores queering, time and materiality through South Asian diasporic, queer and ecological perspectives.
They hold a BA from RMIT and First-Class Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts, where they received the Rodger Davies Award for their durational performance Offerings. Their work has been shown at the National Portrait Gallery, Museum of Australian Photography, Dancehouse and internationally, including the Whitechapel Gallery’s London Open Live.
Devika is part of the arts research collective L&NDLESS and co-founder of queer-time lab GEOFADE, with recent support from Creative Australia and residencies with Performance Space, Critical Path and AADK (Spain).
