Exhibits,
Lilah Benetti HARMATTAN
Opening: Wednesday 29th October, 6-8pm Dates: Oct 29 - Dec 6 2025
Harmattan begins with wind that moves quietly across distance, carrying dust from the Sahara over West Africa between November and March. The air thickens and horizons fade, marking a season of dryness and endurance. Yet this same dust nourishes distant lands, reminding us that movement, memory, and transformation are deeply intertwined.
The exhibition unfolds through moving image and sound. Les Sommes de Nous (2024) offers a meditation on collective identity, language, and intimacy, experienced through headphones in an intimate viewing space. Surrounding it, a portrait soundscape drawn from the Black and Blur [an]archive translates analogue photographs into vibration, where the deepest blacks hum as subsonic frequencies and the whites dissolve into silence.
Within this world, sand, plastic chairs, and woven travel bags create an environment of stillness and drift. Each object gestures toward gatherings, departures, and returns, evoking the small, enduring acts of care that sustain connection across space and time. These familiar materials hold the texture of everyday life, quiet witnesses to resilience and relation.
While the Harmattan wind has never been recorded in so-called Australia, its dust crosses oceans to the Amazon, the Caribbean, and as far as Europe and the United Kingdom. In these shared movements of air and soil, Harmattan becomes a space of relation that honours Indigenous custodianship and the living kinship of weather and land.
Lilah Benetti (they/them) is an artist whose work moves between cinema and contemporary art, guided by an interest in how memory, identity, and belonging take shape through image and sound. Rooted in research and lived experience, their practice explores diasporic memory, kinship, and the spaces between what is seen and what is felt. Benetti creates immersive, atmospheric works that invite a slow kind of looking, where stories unfold through texture, rhythm, and silence rather than certainty. Through blur, light, and movement, they explore how vulnerability reveals the shifting boundaries between self, place, and relationship.