Peoples and Landscapes in Motion

Through the lenses of four eminent Australian photographers, Hoda Asfar, Muzafar Ali, Barat Ali Bartoor and John Gollings, this exhibition presents an intimate portrayal of the human and geographic diversity of the ancient and modern Silk Roads.

The regions represented – present-day Iran, Afghanistan, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China – were the pivot of the ancient Silk Roads, where peoples from all directions converged and connected, leaving enduring cultural, religious, and political legacies.

Traversing vast stretches of land and sea, the network of throughways now known as the Silk Roads connected cosmopolitan cities and isolated trading hubs stretching from Asia to Europe. They have long been sites of rich cultural exchange and sources of vast fortunes that would produce some of the most illustrious products and enduring ideas of human history.

Inspired by faith, profit, and curiosity, missionaries of multiple religions travelled alongside merchants carrying diverse luxurious goods and artists seeking inspiration. Scholars pondering myriad philosophical and scientific questions also joined the journeying. Ambitious and charismatic conquerors, lured by the prospect of wealth and the charm of the unknown swept across Eurasia, building formidable empires in their wake.

The Silk Roads are a powerful idea and a historical reality that reveal the complexity of humanity and its capacity for both remarkable creativity and destruction.

In the 21st century, these once dynamic and interconnected regions have become largely inaccessible and disconnected. Yet, their strategic importance and abundant resources make them fertile grounds for the ambitions of today’s ‘conquerors’. The legacies of colonialism, orientalism, now meet with new forms of religious competition and Islamophobia — and in combination with often fraught domestic politics — there is considerable scope for the peoples, their land, and cultures to be misunderstood and this vast human potential ignored.

The photographs in this exhibition eschew the old habits of exoticisation or the new tendencies to eulogise silent suffering. They are a sincerely offered visual narrative of people’s daily lives, their trauma and hope, the sacred connections between the living and the dead, and the memories of and longing for their homelands.

Peoples and Landscapes in Motion is curated by Ayshe Eli and Louise Edwards. The exhibition is organised by SilkRoads@UNSW, in collaboration with the UNSW Women’s Wellbeing Academy, UNSW Library, and School of Humanities and Languages.

Top image: Muzafar Ali, Students (2006).