Eight SWANA Photographers Reject the Documentary Gaze — in Perth

What does a SWANA show look like when it refuses war imagery?

Eight photographers from across the South West Asia, North Africa (SWANA) region and its many diasporas are showing work at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) until 31 January 2027. No night is long enough for us to dream twice gathers seven artists and one duo, spanning Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Türkiye. Curators Dalia Al-Dujaili and Rachel Cieśla built the show against the documentary cliche. The cameras here do not weep. They wander.

The title borrows a celebrated line from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, born in al-Birwa in 1941, displaced in 1948, declared a "present-absent alien" by Israeli census. Naomi Shihab Nye once said his work remains "lyrical, imagistic, plaintive, haunting, always passionate and elegant — and never anything less than free." Darwish used absurdism to articulate exile. Al-Dujaili followed that thread.

"So much of the work from our region is stuck in war or documentary aesthetics," she explains. "It feels flattening, dehumanising, and also limiting." No flags here. No pomegranates either. The curators wanted audiences surprised by "the universality of concepts like play, desire, lust, violence and celebration."

What does surrealism buy a SWANA photographer today?

Cieśla calls her working idea "documentary futurity" — a documentary impulse that records what is happening while imagining what could come next. "Dreaming is the right word for that," she says, "because a dream isn't a record of the past. It's the mind opening out onto another world that I've created in order to try out another possibility."

The photographs, then, refuse elegy. They keep a door open.

Who is in the room?

The line-up reads like a regional roll call:

• Abdulhamid Kircher — a site-specific 2026 iteration of Rotting from within, with photographs, family snaps and 30 video works
• Mohamad Abdouni — Lebanese, on family, intimacy and queer belonging
• Hicham Benohoud — Moroccan portraits of schoolchildren, shot 1994–2002, after he turned his classroom into a studio
• Sabiha Çimen — Istanbul-born, Magnum member, Hafiz at girls-only Qur'an schools; the book won the 2022 Paris Photo-Aperture First PhotoBook award
• Myriam Boulos — Lebanese, also Magnum, on protest and political change
• Hannah Darabi — found images, collage, bodily autonomy
• Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme — Palestinian duo, with the video-sound work Collapse (2009)
• Mohamed Bourouissa — Algerian-born French photographer, showing Généalogie de la Violence (2024) and the earlier Le cercle imaginaire (2007–08)

Kircher's wall piece, the curators say, sits at the edge of what it can contain. Benohoud's classroom children look anarchic and warm — about as subversive as a four-hour lesson gets. Çimen's students keep their rich inner lives hidden under uniform.

How do you hang a fever dream?

Al-Dujaili describes the installation as "walking through a fever dream." Most images are blown up large. Kircher's work covers a wall whole. Darabi's satirical 1980s gym dance class plays on a fittingly period TV — the only small screen in the room. The other two videos, Collapse and Bourouissa's car-stop film, run at scale.

A book display sits beside the photographs. AGWA's visitors may not know the depth of SWANA photography. "It felt important to challenge what these audiences might expect," Al-Dujaili says, "and hopefully they will leave with a new 'to read' list or a new photobook in their hands."

Why Perth, and why these borders?

Cieśla is Lead Creative at the Simon Lee Foundation Institute of Contemporary Asian Art, a curatorial initiative at AGWA. She reached Al-Dujaili through her HIKMA project — an online repository and library on Mesopotamia and modern Iraq. A WhatsApp message followed. Photography, diaspora, dreams — the brief wrote itself.

The show resists geographic neatness. "The borders across SWANA have been drawn and redrawn, and people move across them constantly," Cieśla adds. The curators grouped the artists around shared pressure, not shared postcode. Cities, homes, bodies — all squeezed, all rebuilding.

Bourouissa's banlieue teenagers and Çimen's Qur'anic pupils sit in different centuries of discipline. Both images thrum with the same quiet refusal. Verdict: a rare SWANA exhibition that does not look away from joy — and that treats the region's photographers as artists first, witnesses second.

No night is long enough for us to dream twice runs at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until 31 January 2027.