Stolon Press in Gateway 2025: 'Seeds of Memory - Migration as Ceremony, Survival, and Renewal' →

Stolon Press (Simryn Gill)
November 19-23, 2025 | Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi

Stolon Press
Mixed Business No. 1, 2025
cardboard boxes (Missile Apples, South Australia; Durra Sunflower Oil, Malaysia; Tahineh, Kalaajieh, Lebanon; Moloky Thyme, Zaidan al Ammouri and Sons, Jordon; Royal Fields Stuffed Vine Leaves, Turkey; Wagh Bakri, Special International Blend Tea, Ahmedabad, India; Best Taste Pickled Cucumber, Iran; Duru Fine Bulgur, Turkey), etching ink, jute thread
110.24 x 62.99 inches

Gateway is an art exhibition held each November at Manarat Al Saadiyat during the Abu Dhabi Art Fair. Curated by Brook Andrew, the exhibition presents local and international artists through a distinctive curatorial lens. The exhibition is sponsored by Abu Dhabi Art’s Global Partner, HSBC.

The 2025 edition, titled Seeds of Memory - Migration as Ceremony, Survival, and Renewal features Betty Muffler, Issam Kourbaj, Leila Shirazi, Mohamed Majeed Almubarak, Natalia Papaeva and BANG ON Collective, Nomasmetaforas, Stolon Press, Sa Tahanan Co., & Vincent Namatjira 

Migration is a powerful term that encompasses a vast array of experiences across life and the universe. It includes the movement of water, seeds, animals, cultures, people, and their intertwined histories. These migrations—whether visible or invisible, physical or symbolic—are often deeply personal, evoking complex emotions and connections. They serve as profound metaphors for change, survival, and transformation. For Abu Dhabi Art 2025, curator and artist Brook Andrew delves into migration not only as a physical action but also as a poetic and political force. He explores it as a means to inspire and reminisce, to reflect on our place in the world, and to engage with others through performance, storytelling, and diverse cultural expressions. His curatorial vision invites audiences to participate in migration as an evolving and collective memory, one that can be celebratory, challenging, and healing—all at once. Through this lens, migration becomes a universal and shared human experience. 

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Stolon Press’s 'Hustle Culture' screened at 'Of Mountains and Seas' at Asia Now, Paris →

Stolon Press (Simryn Gill and Tom Melick)
October 25, 5:30-8:00pm | Asia Now 2025, La Monnaie de Paris

Stolon Press, Hustle Culture (video and publication), 2024
Single-channel video, 1:00:36
Commissioned by Lahore Biennale Foundation
Made possible with the support of Creative Australia

Complementing Lahore Biennale Foundation’s presentation of artworks in the Monnaie de Paris, Asia Now also presents a video program from Of Mountains and Seas, the 2024 edition, featuring video commissioned by the Lahore Biennale Foundation from Bani Abidi, Stolon Press (Simryn Gill and Tom Melick), Niamat Nigar, Fazal Rizvi, and Zheng Bo, as well as works by Gidree Bawlee. The program, like the works on view throughout the Monnaie de Paris, offer a vision of ecological awareness from Asian perspectives. Powered by the French Embassy to Pakistan.

Stolon Press’s Hustle Culture is a record made of the daily life around three bird baths placed under a chaste tree and a tamarind tree, in a small garden, in a small town in Malaysia. The visitors to the baths vary—sunbirds, fantails, swallows, an occasional tailorbird, maybe even a kingfisher or oriole, a toad, as well the neighborhood’s fat cat. The baths are washed and refilled regularly; sometimes there are no visitors at all, save for a floating feather; the camera is too slow or too fast, too impatient, or badly positioned. Instead of a story or plot, there is rhythm, fluttering, and a daily patterning. The video is accompanied by an eponymous publication produced with typists in Lahore.

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Stolon Press and Chui Lee Luk: Live feed at 1301SW, Sydney →

Simryn Gill
July 19 –August 23, 2025 | 1301SW, Sydney

Stolon Press, Strainers, 2025 (detail view)

Live feed, a modest and preliminary collaboration between a publisher and chef, asks us to consider our need for daily nourishment. How do goods and foodstuffs reach the shop and the table, what are the distances travelled, and the means and processes that make this possible? What do we do with this fresh or aged or packaged or processed produce to make it palatable and consumable? What do we talk about over the meal? 

Preparing two shared meals five weeks apart, Chui Lee Luk attempts to lay bare the hierarchies of cooking and eating. The first meal is made from just-harvested and picked produce, the second from fermented, pickled, sprouted and growing ingredients. In the interim between meals, her processes will be visible in the space.  

Alongside, Stolon Press present their recent series of prints, Strainers (2025), made from cardboard boxes collected from shops around their neighbourhood in Sydney. In Small talk (2025-), they use a ledger typewriter as a poultice, drawing out memories of dinner table conversations and informal thoughts.

Stolon Press is an art and publishing collective whose work sits somewhere between art and book, image and text. In 2024, they published Shallow (Simryn Gill, Charles Lim Yi Yong, Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, and Selene Yap) and Hustle Culture (Tom Melick). Their forthcoming titles include new pocket books by Quentin Sprague, Trent Walter and Soucho Yao, and an Urdu translation of Hustle Culture by Nusra Qureshi. Recent exhibitions include the Lahore Biennale and Flat earth, with Khaled Sabsabi and Elisa Taber, at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). 

Chui Lee Luk is a chef who has run various restaurants in Sydney. Most notably, she was the chef and owner of the legendary French restaurant, Claude’s, for nearly a decade. She is also the author of the cookbook, Green Pickled Peaches.

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Simryn Gill and Tom Melick's Stolon Press in 'Flat earth' at Monash University Museum of Art →

Simryn Gill
May 29 – July 12 2025 | Monash University Museum of Art

Stolon Press, Mixed business, 2025. Installation View, Stolon Press: Flat earth, Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Naarm/Melbourne, 2025. Photo by Andrew Curtis.

Working with the question of how an exhibition might be a book, Flat earth presents a diagrammatic flat plan of a proposal in space.

Stolon Press is a Sydney-based art and publishing collective whose work sits somewhere between art and book, image and text. Established in 2019 by writer Tom Melick and artist Simryn Gill, Stolon Press has published twenty books to date, regularly involving an extended network of collaborators and friends.

Conceived as a flattened ‘map’, Flat earth creates a shared space where artistic, linguistic and material practices converge. Artworks overlap across the galleries as a material gesture toward cohabitation and neighbourliness. Flat earth brings together work by longtime Stolon Press collaborators, including writer, translator, and anthropologist Elisa Taber, and Lebanese-born, Sydney-based artist Khaled Sabsabi. Considering the postponement by Monash University on March 25, 2025, the artists have chosen to show works from their practices and processes made from residual materials.

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RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology at the Barbican review: hits hard right from the start →

Simryn Gill & Diana Thater | the Evening Standard

Fern Shaffer, Nine Year Ritual of Healing - 9 April, 1998, 1998

By Ben Luke

This important and timely exhibition about ecofeminism and art across several decades, gathers 50 international women and gender-nonconforming artists who explore the links between the oppression of women and environmental collapse. An exhibition titled RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology undoubtedly risks preaching only to the choir, but that would be a shame. It is both ambitious and admirable, if uneven in places.

Mostly through film and photography, it treats the climate emergency as systemic and intersectional; connected to widespread abuses of power relating to the extractive impulses of colonialism and capitalism, to racism and the exploitation of indigenous communities. Organised thematically, it has distinctive focuses within this vast subject, from the effects of industrial extractivism, to histories of protest and artists’ reimaginings of the connection beneath the Earth and womanhood.

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