Leuli Eshraghi
Multilingual artist / Curator / Arts Manager
Multilingual Samoan-Persian artist, curator, arts manager, Leuli's practice within painting, printmaking, and writing references family histories, spirituality, cultural memory and connection to place. Recent works investigate narratives embedded in sites of cultural memory in island Oceania. His curatorial practice is centered on the critical treatment of transnational histories in Australia and abroad. He works as Marketing and Finance Coordinator at The Ownership Project print studio and gallery, and as a freelance curator, project coordinator and liaison interpreter.
He has worked in arts development and advocacy at the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (2011-13), Kultour (2010) and Arts Industry Council Victoria (2010), and in arts programming at Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival (2012-13), and Island Vibe Festival (2007-10).
Leuli was founding Curator and Coordinator of Heartlands Refugee Art Prize (2010) and French-English interpreter at the 13th Pacific Games (2007), the Australian Festival of Travel Writing (2010) and AWME (2011).He was also co-curator of the 10th anniversary exhibition Wilin 10 (2012), profiling alumni and graduate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists across nations, mediums and experimentations. He also co-curated So Fukin Native (2012), winner of Melbourne Fringe 2012 Best Visual Arts Show, where Aboriginal and Pacific artists challenged pejorative speech, ironic hipster fashion and derivative symbolic treatment with simultaneous reclamations of cultural trajectories.
Current projects include Motu - a non-profit organisation promoting critical development and representation of Oceanian arts and design in Australia and across the globe. Motu will soon produce an online Australian directory of Oceanian arts and design practitioners, a new biannual print/online magazine, and an associated online channel, featuring interviews and short works.