Subway River by Omar Musa

Artist Statement

How often I’ve sat down with my grandparents, and a story I’m told solidifies into a personal mythology, only to find out years later that I’d misheard (or mislistened?) and crucial things were lost in translation.

In All My Memories Are Mistranslations, I wanted to lean into dissonance, these spaces lacking coherence; find comfort in contradiction. I made an unlikely mash-up of the two very different places I live between — Malaysian Borneo and Brooklyn, New York City —  to make a playful, unsettling world inhabited by ghosts. Here, there is a clash of rose-tinted romanticism against latter day capitalism and ecological collapse; the discarded and the sacred, grief and rejuvenation, the joy and pain of homecoming. The ghost of a famous anti-colonial rebel stands in an abandoned building. Bornean boys sail across a coin operated washing machine in Brooklyn. Aquatic creatures flow across the sky into a fish trap as a figure takes a selfie in the mirror. A boat, a symbol of my ancestral Suluk seafaring, sinks in an ocean of plastic trash.

Fearful of fetishizing ruin or trash, I wanted instead to portray sites of rubbish dumping or decay as theatres of power struggle between forces of consumption, capital and culture. As I made the work, I often wondered, when does diasporic longing and exploration become a problematic tourist gaze? I tried to flip this anxiety into humour by taking literal, mass-produced New York tourist tat and turning it into a scene for diasporic memory-making. While there is humour and love here. And anger. Broadly, at the destruction wrought upon my homeland (and the world) by unsustainable practices and climate change, but also at myself.

Thanks to Rinaldo Hartanto, Boyz Bieber, Pangrok Sulap and Luna Ryan for their help creating this work.

— Omar Musa, 2024

About the Artist

Omar Musa is a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist and poet from Queanbeyan. He has released four poetry books (including Killernova), four hip-hop records, and received a standing ovation at TEDx Sydney at the Sydney Opera House.

His debut novel Here Come the Dogs was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and Miles Franklin Award and he was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year in 2015. His one-man play, Since Ali Died, won Best Cabaret Show at the Sydney Theatre Awards in 2018.

Omar has had several exhibitions of his woodcuts including here at Humble House in 2021.