Hamishi Farah 
Drawings from Airport Love Theme

April 26 - June 29 

Open on weekends 12 - 4 pm
and by appointment


‘Drawings from Airport Love Theme’ presents 116 hand drawn pages from a graphic novel alongside a painting.

Airport Love Theme was published in 2020 by Book Works London, based on Farah’s experience in 2016 being held and interrogated in a detention facility at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) after attempting to travel into the US from Australia for an art fair in New York.

Sometimes absurd, sometimes banal exchanges involving power, delusion, desire, projection, celebrity, antagonism, food, and family plays out between an ensemble of two groups: detainees travelling from mostly Postcolonial states and a unit of mostly racialised American border security officers.

The painting, Untitled (Bedroom in Arles), 2016, - a stretched copy of a Van Gogh - was carried through the detention facility at LAX during events detailed in the graphic novel and was eventually exhibited at NADA Art fair in New York, without Farah’s attendance.

This story of policy enforcement occurred in 2016 under an Obama administration. Upon the book’s publishing in 2020, it underscored a failure to deliver on an international art world’s promise of mobility fueled by selectively permeable borders. Accounts of arbitrary detainment and denial of entry have echoed more frequently in 2025 as an outcome of discriminate hardening of spatial boundaries in Europe and the U.S, along racial and religious lines, punishing dissenting political belief (particularly Palestinian solidarity) and often utilised for cruel political theatre.




Hamishi Farah
Born in 1991 in Melbourne, Australia.

Recent exhibitions include
Undermining the Immediacy, MMK, Frankfurt (2025) Post Scriptum. A museum forgotten by heart, MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Rome (2024); Black Painting, Maxwell Graham, New York (2023); London, UK, Arcadia Missa, London (2023) Dog Heaven 2: How Sweet the Wound of Jesus Tastes, Fri Art Kunsthalle Fribourg, Fribourg (2021); Antagoni, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2020)

Farah’s graphic novel Airport Love Theme, based on a true story, was first published by Book Works in the UK in January 2020, second edition in 2023







 

The show is kindly supported by:
The Danish Arts Foundation - The Augustinus Foundation - Silkeborg Municipality 

Institut Funder Bakke
Æbeløvej 20
8600 Silkeborg
Denmark
Institutfunderbakke.com
Open Saturdays and Sundays 12 - 4pm and by appointment

IFB has step-free access.
If you have questions please feel free to contact us institutfunderbakke@gmail.com