Image: Moshe Rosenzveig
Head On Photo Festival is based in here Sydney and we love this city! It’s a melting pot of people from all nations, cultures and includes all languages. Our annual photo festival, one of the major arts festivals in Australia, is proudly diverse and inclusive. The photography and art exhibited in the Festival often shines a light on cultures, communities and societies outside of our own.
We are more than upset to discover, whilst literally still installing our 2021 Festival exhibitions along the promenade at Bondi Beach, that some idiot has (idiots have) defaced one of our incredible featured exhibitions in a way that suggests racism.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
After Covid-19 prevented the long-standing tradition of returning home for Chinese New Year, Horace Li built a backdrop of a ‘siheyuan’ (a historical Chinese residence) for Sydney’s Chinese community. His exhibition The Journey Home documents their stories through family portraits in front of this symbolic home. Horace says “I documented the stories of these Chinese families during this special period. There was homesickness, regrets, helplessness in the stories, but there was also warmth. This will eventually become how we remember the Year of the Ox.” He has been documenting the city’s Chinese diaspora since moving to Sydney in 2011.
Image: Stephen Godfrey
We’re disappointed that vandals have spray painted the faces of the people in Horace’s exhibition. This is astonishingly bad behaviour. It’s also totally out of step with the reality of life in our wonderful city, indeed our country. Not only is Australia home to the world’s oldest continuous culture, one in four Australians are born overseas, and one in five speaks a language other than English at home. We are replacing this show and will not give in to racism, however covert.
Image: Horace Li from The Journey Home
Horace Li’s exhibition is on the promenade at the southern end of Bondi Beach. You can still visit it and the many other exhibitions we have there as part of the 2021 Head On Photo Festival which runs from 20-28 November at Bondi Beach, Paddington Reservoir Gardens and online. For more information, have a look at our program here.
