TPAN

Palestinian musician Majdi Aljelda is joining Sawtooth ARI for their exhibition opening.

Come along for an evening of visual and sound art, nurturing your mind and soul.

About Majdi

Majdi Aljelda is a musician from Gaza City, Palestine.

He started learning music when he was a kid in 2000. At the Palestinian Music Institute, he learned music therapy and how to play the piano. He participated in many concerts in Gaza starting in 2003, and learned other instruments, like guitar, accordion, and oud.

He was a member with Edward Saeed National Conservatory of Music, participated with Orchestra of Gaza band, Eastern music band, and other bands through the conservatory. He also was a member with Al Sununu for Culture and Arts association, a musician with kids and adults’ choirs, and a teacher for music therapy, oud, and accordion instruments.

Majdi performed at many events and concerts in Sydney, with Fairfield Council, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Bankstown Arts Centre, a member with the Spirit Of The Orient Choir, and had his own concerts with his brother Seraj in Sydney, Hobart, and Cygnet, sharing the Palestinian culture and music through his performances.

About the exhibitions

rruni mana-mapali ‘Our Island' by DENNI

rruni mana-mapali ‘Our Island’ is a visual art and sound installation that honours milaythina (country). 

‘Painting on cast acrylic sheets is an exciting process that has an edge of permanence with every stroke. This sentiment reflects the strength of our culture passed on through stories and art, song and dance. Always here, always strong in connection, always caretakers of land, sea and the stories they hold. rruni mana-mapali is a celebration of ‘Our Island’ and the beautiful creatures we share it with.’

DENNI is proud Pakana woman and artist best know for her work in First Nations Hip Hop. Visual art and design has always been a big part of the artist’s core practice with drawing and poetry leading her down a successful path in the Arts. She has worked in many fields including music, theatre, puppetry and design. Inspired by her culture, DENNI continues to be a strong advocate of culture through her Art and music. Recently diving into production the artist is enjoying the challenge of creating ideas from scratch with the tools around her. Recently becoming a Mum DENNI is enjoying finding new ways to approach her many arts practices, recently finding joy from painting on Cast Acrylic sheets (reverse painting) bringing her to exhibiting her first Visual/Sound installation in her hometown. 

Over Everything by Noel Maghathe

‘Over Everything’ explores the relationship between memory and self. Running through the nostalgia ingrained in familial archives—some never held a place, some they never touched—Maghathe navigates moments they never lived. Some they can still feel, others are barely tangible. In the process, they construct new memories that blur the lines between truth and fabrication. The complex interplay of emotions and stories surfaces through each image, layering time, absence, joy, and longing into overlapping frames that each offer fragments of past truths. 

These photographs become points of rediscovery, each holding inherited stories. Embedded with words and motifs, the fabric becomes a means of communication with the past—to a younger self, to close and distant relatives. Over Everything examines how memory is shaped, altered, and remembered through the act of retrieval, initiating a dialogue between longing, connection, and remembrance. 

Noel Maghathe is a Palestinian-American multidisciplinary artist and curator. Their practice is deeply rooted in their heritage, searching for home within the body and memory. Through sculpture, performance, and light, they explore themes of identity, cultural memory, and longing.

Fluid Pathways by Karen Hall

This work traces the unseen and ephemeral water paths through the urban environment of Launceston. In a series of audio walks contained within sounding vessels, you are invited to carry with you the density of interconnections through a landscape where water soaks deep and pulses through. From Sawtooth’s location on a swamp, looking out to lakeller/North Esk, you travel together with invocations and evocations of forces that carve through deep time connecting past with present and future. Following the lines of hidden and contained infrastructures of colonial modernity – the webs of drains, pipes and levies – reveal the precarity of colonial landshaping. As the hydrological cycle intensifies, our encounters and our relationships with water moving through the landscape also intensify: attending to the momentary flows of sudden and severe weather events, the parched absences of rain the crack the reclaimed swap soil, and the opportunistic occupation of the shifting river margins.

Karen Hall is an educator, curator and writer. Moving to Lutruwita from Western Australia/ Whadjuk Noongar country 15 years ago, she’s found building connection with the ecological and cultural histories driving her research and practice. She is interested in how sound and site-based material can produce radical sympathy for the more0than-human.

Confluence by Dave Carswell

This series ‘Confluence’ continues my examination of the kanamaluka estuary and its various tributaries. Sitting alongside previous political documentation, ‘confluence’ engages a more personal lens to the contested spaces by examining the social ecology of the waterways. 

The work unpacks a ‘coming of age’ narrative as young families and teens spend listless summer days basting by the riverbanks, jumping with recklessness amongst the ancient boulders in the riverbed. 

Stripped of the ordinary markers of class, the democratic nature of this space heightens the focus of the interrelations at play. Teens smoking and fondling through early courtships, young children test their limits of their physicality and fear while parents oversee with one eye waiting for an imminent time when their presence is no longer needed. 

The scaling of trees and towering rocks symbolises a yearning or jumping off into the unknown. Set amongst the escapism of the idyllic summer, the series emits a calm tranquility amongst the fragility of the landscape. 

Dave Carswell is a photographer currently based in Lutruwita/Tasmania. His photographic practice is rooted in documentary image making with his interests motivated by the intersection between nature, humanity and the built environment. Carswell’s work is concerned with the manner of anthropological intervention on the built landscape with a recent focus towards public space and the way economic, social and ecological influences shape contested spaces.

These exhibitions run until 30 May 2025.