Matthew Asling

Matthew Asling
Perdésa
1 May - 7 June 2025
Opening 5.30 - 7.30 Thursday 1 May 2025

We are pleased to present Perdésa, Matthew Asling's first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will run concurrently with our presentation of Asling's work at NADA New York.

Asling’s work is informed by his Assyrian-Australian identity, his family history of displacement and migration, and the history of Assyrian genocide and religious persecution. This history of displacement is woven into the fabric of his paintings, with Assyrian Neo-Aramaic script often stitched or ironed into their surfaces. The works are reflections on the notion of home, diaspora and the complexities of belonging.

The exhibition title, Perdésa, is derived from the ancient Assyrian word for garden or enclosed space, which later came to be associated with the concept of paradise. The exhibition considers Perdésa as a complex and layered space shaped by cultural, historical, and geographical influences.

Asling explores how ideas of homeland are remembered, maintained, and constructed over time, particularly within diasporic communities. The works reference Assyrian historical geography, spanning the river valleys of Mesopotamia, the plains of Tur Abdin, and the mountains of Hakkari, where Asling's family originally hails from. This fragmented and often interrupted map continues to inform contemporary Assyrian identity through oral histories, traditions, and inherited memory.

Asling employs a range of ready-made materials, such as tarpaulin, gauze and burlap, off-cuts, construction remnants, and worn textiles, in lieu of the traditional canvas. These materials function both as references to physical displacement and as symbols of ongoing preservation and reconstruction. Their embedded histories and weathered surfaces suggest a quiet continuity, reflecting the persistence of culture through periods of upheaval and change.

Asling is the 2023 recipient of the Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship, and will undertake an extended period of travelling research throughout the second half of 2025. Asling holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of Arts.