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"I considered the asylum seekers who lived in those non-zones to be part of our community - that was the first border I broke down. They are not part of some other community, they are our community."
 
Jamil Yamani
 
On a phosphate rock in the Micronesian South Pacific, a small but significant group of travellers boarded a plane. Flight 351, bound for Brisbane, carried twenty-one Sri Lankan asylum seekers - the last of the refugees detained and processed on Nauru, the world's smallest island nation, and the last remaining bastion of John Howard's 'Pacific Solution'.
 
From late-September 2001 until  its dissolution in February 2008, this controversial border protection policy saw thousands of islands excised from Australia's migration zone and the establishment of detention centres outside Australia's (now reconfigured, now vigilantly policed) borders.  As Australia drew in its borders, jettisoned its territories, and rebuffed refuge seekers (now reconfigured as 'illegals' and 'queue jumpers') a new shadow-world was crystallised in the watery outposts beyond the mainland - a 'Not-Australia' peopled by 'non-Australians'.
 
In the formulation of academic Suvendrini Perera, the passage of the Tampa, and the passing through parliament of the Pacific Solution was a line drawn in the sea, 'carceral forces separating asylum seekers from the rest of us'.   Perera writes of a desire to 'bring home the refugee at the border', like that last plane out of Nauru, to seek spaces and strategies, 'images and stories that  reconnect us with the bodies on the other side of the razor wire'.  We might yet locate this alternate zone of inclusion and hospitality in the practice of Sydney-based artist Jamil Yamani. A breach in the border.
 
Spanning video and sculptural installation, and with a tight, trained focus on the tropes of exilic experience, Yamani perforates and displaces borders of law, imagination and form.
 
In a single-channel video work from 2005, All quiet on the Western Front¸ which appears on the back cover of Art & Australia,   the artist - now split in two, now literally beside himself - points to the complexity of political and cultural identity in a simple gesture of reciprocity: he takes himself out to dinner.
 
Yamani's secular and observant selves share a meal, but radically different customs. Delineated by attire, cuisine and action, one Yamani eats with his right hand, the other with a knife and fork; one consumes a beer before the meal, the other concludes with a lassi.  Although Yamani's two selves never speak, the artist nevertheless locates surprising spaces of exchange and mutuality.
 
Yamani's eastern incarnation occupies the western sphere of the screen image; westernised Yamani, the east; a jar of preserved lemons, a staple of Middle Eastern cuisine, is 'displaced', artfully, in the western sphere, and observing the entire scene, is Mohandas Gandhi - a vigilant emblem of peace, truth and resistance. 
   
The glittering city, 2007, is the final work in Yamani's migration trilogy, and the most ambitious. Yamani travelled to the Kakuma Refugee Camp, on the far northern border of Kenya, to document this extreme non-zone - the single largest transitional habitation site in the world. In a kinetic sculpture with embedded, multichannel video, footage gathered in Kakuma is paired with images of the Australian coastline, filmed from the chassis of a Beechcroft twin engine aircraft.
 
The sculpture rotates in a clockwise direction, as the footage of landlocked camp and contested coastal border plays both backward and forward in time. As the artist describes it, the inverted shaft of light within an architectural form 'symbolises a lighthouse beam'. 
 
And so in Yamani's glittering city we discover what can 'bring home the refugee at the border': a beacon of light in the darkness, a gesture of hospitality, a hand across the border.
 
For further information on the artist, visit www.jamilyamani.com.
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2008 issue.