Mapping space between old and new constellations…

Alta Forma is delighted to present a new body of work by Naarm based artist Sary Zananiri. ‘Crossing seas and following stars’ examines star motifs embroidered on historic Palestinian cushions depicting the Australian flag. These embroideries were specifically produced for Australian troops stationed in Palestine during World War Two.  The flags contain Southern Cross constellations askew, loosely interpreted by the women who made them. The exhibition plays with the religious overtones of the Southern Cross, from the place where Christianity originated, to consider both the cultural confluences and disjunctures of relations between Australia and Palestine.

Meditating on the mobility of people, objects and culture, the exhibition engages Palestinian practices of mother of pearl carving and inlay. Conflating the motifs of the Star of Bethlehem, a traditional symbol, with the seven-pointed Federation Star of Australia, Sary’s flag-like acrylic objects create new constellations from the old. Additional installation based works, utilising collected mother of pearl crucifixes made in Bethlehem dating from the 1820s to the 1980s, map the space between these old and new constellations.

About the project:

‘During my postdoctoral research at Leiden University, I became interested in the history of Palestinian mother of pearl carving in Bethlehem. From the seventeenth century onwards, the city became the epicentre of a transnational trade in carved religious goods shaping peoples’ perceptions of the ‘Holy Land’ through Palestinian trading nodes set up as far away as Port-au-Prince in the Caribbean or Manilla and Singapore in Southeast Asia. While researching in Athens, I started to come across small mother of pearl crucifixes that had been made in Palestine in markets and second-hand stores.  These discarded objects, vestiges of peoples’ pilgrimages to the ‘Holy Land’, started to form a cartography of objects, people and relations. Several years later, a chance gift from a friend of two cushion covers made by Palestinian women for Australian troops stationed there during the Second World War spoke to me of the agency of Palestinians in the ways they carefully addressed different cultural consumers. As I mused on the relationship between Palestine and the ‘Holy Land’, the Earth and the heavens, I started to consider how the stars of the Southern Cross, askew in the flags had a confluence with the motif of the Star of Bethlehem, leading people, objects and ideas back and forth between hemispheres, with all the connections and disjunctures that such movements entail.’ Sary Zananiri, 2025.

About the artist:

Sary Zananiri is an artist and cultural historian interested in the interaction between visual culture and processes of identity formation, particularly in the modern Arab World. By tracing the movement and circulation of people, objects and ideas, Zananiri’s work is concerned with cultural mediations from a transnational perspective. Recent exhibitions include the Qattan Foundation (2023), University of Groningen Library (2023), INALCO (June-July 2022), the Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival,Tunis (September 2022), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (December 2021-February 2022), the National Glass Museum, Wagga Wagga (July-November 2021), Rijksmuseum Oudheden, Leiden (May-October 2020) and Der Haus Der Kunst der Welt for ALMS, Berlin (June 2019). Zananiri has co-edited three books on photography and cultural diplomacy in British Mandate Palestine. Their forthcoming monograph, Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine (IB Tauris 2026), looks at nationalist constructions of religion and masculinity in Palestine. Zananiri is a Senior Lecturer at Monash Art, Design and Architecture.

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