Navigating Histories:
Ren Gregorčič, Phuong Le, Chris Siu, Estelle Yoon
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PhotoAccess Gallery, Manuka Arts Centre
Exhibition
Weaving together historical narratives and their contemporary reverberations, Navigating Histories, explores displacement, memory, and identity. Through video and documentary photography, the artists explore societies in transition. They navigate geopolitical complexities and historical imprints, while communities enact their narratives in new environments or amidst evolving scenes at home, continuously adapting and shaping their sense of place.
Exhibition artists
Ren Gregorčič
Ren Gregorčič is an Australian-Slovenian artist working in film to interrogate materials and spatial configurations of landscapes, and relationships between materiality, form, structure, and power.
Gregorčič has a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts, MA (Cultural Materials Conservation) from The University of Melbourne and is presently a Fine Art PhD candidate at the Australian National University. He has worked in conservation roles at various museums and was awarded a Junior Fellowship by the American Slovenian Education Foundation in 2021.
Phuong Le
Phuong Nguyen Le is an emerging Vietnamese artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). He employs photography to explore themes of identity, family, sexuality, and decolonisation. His work critically examines his position within an ongoing colonial structure in the Asia-Pacific region, characterised by violence, censorship, and division.
In 2024, he published his debut monograph, Sunshine, which was featured in the Australian & New Zealand Photobook Awards at PHOTO2024, Melbourne. He also participated in the Today/Tomorrow group exhibition at the Parliament of Victoria during PHOTO2024.
Chris Siu
Chris Siu, a Hong Kong-born photographer based in Adelaide, South Australia, works primarily in medium-format analogue photography. His work explores the intricate relationships within his surrounding social landscapes, pivoting around representations of civil unrest, diasporic experience, cultural displacement, and marginality within contemporary existence. Siu has exhibited at various venues throughout Australia, including Nexus Arts, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental, Centre for Contemporary Photography, and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Estelle Yoon
Estelle Yoon is a Korean-Australian visual artist living and practising on unceded Gadigal land. Working across analogue photography, moving image, and glass, her practice interrogates displacement, queerness, and transnational identity through material and emotional tension. Grounded in a phenomenological framework and an autotheoretical methodology, Yoon’s works reflect on the architectures of belonging, home, and identity.
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