We had a friend from Afghanistan when I was a child. He was a handsome, educated and cultured man, and a civil engineer by profession. He was a refugee from the Russian invasion, and while in Australia he worked as a cleaner in a Johnson & Johnson factory and lived alone in a bed-sit. My family met him while we were street-preaching the gospel. We were uneducated fundamentalist Christians and thought that we might "save" him. I remember how he came to bible study group, sing-alongs around the piano and remained respectfully reserved while being open and tolerant to who we were as people. In a strange reversal to the usual stereotype, in our Christian set women wore hats or headscarves to demonstrate their "submission" to men, while he came from a liberal Muslim sect where women no longer wore headscarves and were educated professionals alongside men. A couple of years later he moved to the USA where he was reunited with members of his family and resumed his profession.

I often think of Ali and what he must have made of us all. I think of how he came on a road trip to Adelaide with us - my brother, sisters and some friends. The jokes we shared, the hilarious misunderstandings of language and culture. I think of how we all spent weekends standing, painting, cleaning, as he and we helped my brother to renovate his house in Marrickville. I remember the flavours of the lamb and the carrots and the spiced rice that he carefully made for us - as if he had been cooking for all his life. (What were the other details of his life, and who taught him how to cook?) I remember the smell of Camel cigarettes in his thick black beard and moustache, but mostly what I remember was the deeply shared humanity, despite him being a liberal educated Muslim and we fundamentalist, sectarian Christians. I feel a love for this man, and the kind of liberal, cultured, educated Islam that he represents, and I feel so sad that his country of birth has been overtaken by the violent, ignorant, fundamentalism of the Taliban.

"The fundamental function of art is to gather the contradictions and complexities of the life world. Being an 'imago mundi', the work of art helps man to dwell" (1)

"They saw that ordinary [objects], especially uprooted from their practical functions, [in other contexts and relation to one another], contain a wealth of unintended, unpredictable, meanings." (2)

The Middle East occupies an enormous part of Western collective imagination. It appears daily on the internet with reportage from the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, the Israel/Palestine conflict, the Arab Spring, refugees and racial tensions in European countries. The fatwa on Salman Rushdie (the Islamic Revolution), The Gulf War, 9/11, The War on Terror, The Call to Jihad, Osama bin Laden, Abu Ghraib, the Guantanamo have become the major historical/cultural markers of our time.

In their context, using minimal means and everyday objects, I respond to the politics and sociology of the phrase "Of Middle Eastern Appearance". Some of the images are based on fleeting impressions from the internet or television and some are based on deeply felt personal experience. I attempt to gather some of the rich and contradictory notions of the Middle East, like fragments of a complex mosaic. Literally many of the images come from a huge toy box of stereotypes, which have been photographed to illustrate the unstable narrative of a menacing and exotic other.

Formally, my practice exploits the representational possibilities of manufactured things. It could be described as painting with readymade colours, forms and textures, or 'painting with objects' in the traditional genres such as landscape or portraiture. I have found a remarkably wide range of Middle Eastern portraits and readymade affective states from my toy-box alone.

I love texture, colours and morphology of moulded cardboard and its intrinsic architectural forms, particularly useful to represent the mud-brick, stone and the cave dwellings found in the vernacular architecture of the Middle East

ELAINE CAMPANER

"I didn't trust it for a moment

But I drank it anyway,

The wine of my own poetry,

It gave me the daring

To tear down the darkness

And cut it up into little pieces" (3)

1. Genius Loci. Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. Christian Norberg-Schulz. Rizzoli, New York. United States Edition 1980

2. Henri Cartier-Bression. The Early Work. Texts by Peter Galassi. Museum of Modern Art, New York. French edition 1987

3. Lalla 14th Century Female Sufi Poet