Vessel Contemporary

Vessel Contemporary An interdisciplinary exhibition for contemporary art. Using art as a catalyst for change.

Vessel is stoked to announce the launch of our second Artist-in-Residence program with emerging First Nations artist Emm...
02/06/2026

Vessel is stoked to announce the launch of our second Artist-in-Residence program with emerging First Nations artist Emma-Lee Maher, a Kongabula artist and writer, born on Ballardong Country and raised between the Wheatbelt and the Southwest. Her work digs into memory, family and place across visual and written forms. Emma has exhibited at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, and her writing has been published in Portside Review and Splinter Journal.

This is a unique paid opportunity for an emerging or early career First Nations artist to undertake an 8 week Artist-in-Residency (AIR) at Vessel during our next major exhibition ‘Between Suns’ by Khaled Sabsabi. This program is facilitated by Board Director and independent curator Zali Morgan.

“This project starts with a tin of family documents I was given as a kid—material I’ve lived alongside for most of my life. The residency gives me the time and space to come back to that through making, and to let this personal body of work unfold with care into something that can be shared.” - Emma-Lee Maher

This public-facing program provides valuable space, time, and connections for artistic development while engaging the local community. Vessel aims to create a contemporary environment that promotes experimentation and learning through practice, with the residency serving as a hub for development, mentorship, and artistic collaboration.

Thanks to the Fulcrum Fund and the Fremantle Foundation for your generous support for this project. This program couldn’t have been possible without your commitment to supporting First Nations creatives and artists.

10 weeks left until ‘Between Suns’ by Khaled Sabsabi opens at Vessel Contemporary. Responding to the site, ‘Between Suns...
31/05/2026

10 weeks left until ‘Between Suns’ by Khaled Sabsabi opens at Vessel Contemporary.

Responding to the site, ‘Between Suns’ unfolds as a multi-sensory journey through painting, video, sound, smell and installation. Anchored by Sabsabi’s first exhibited work Aajyna (1998), the exhibition traces a sustained inquiry into mysticism, the everyday, fate and coincidence - forces that quietly shape our experiences of life.

We cannot wait for this to unfold and for audiences in Western Australia to engage with Khaleds’s practice.
‘Between Suns’ is curated by Mikala Tai and opens on Friday 7th of August.

More info at the link in bio.

Photography: Andrew Curtis

Vessel is thrilled to present our next Artist-in-Residence: Cara Teusner- Gartland. Cara’s residency is part of our coll...
13/05/2026

Vessel is thrilled to present our next Artist-in-Residence: Cara Teusner- Gartland. Cara’s residency is part of our collaboration with SPACED and Fremantle Buffalo Club.

Know Thy Neighbour is SPACED’s metro-focused residency program that commissions socially engaged, context-responsive art projects embedded in Perth’s neighbourhoods. The program asks communities and artists alike to step beyond habitual encounters with their surroundings—to explore scenarios that defamiliarise and recontextualise “the local.”

Know Thy Neighbour #4: Gestures asks artists to transmit ideas grounded in physical environments, investigating acts of connection and reciprocity in their projects to uncover relational possibilities and mutual understanding. Gestures can be quiet or bold, habitual or improvised, yet they often carry deep social, cultural and historical weight. Whether physical or intangible, present or absent, explicit or implied, Gestures offer a generative space for artists to respond to the complexity of metropolitan Perth with attentiveness, curiosity, and care; embracing co-creation as a form of exchange, and artistic practice as a way of listening.

Read more about the project in bio

Photography: Will Ek Uvelius

Commissioned by SPACED as part of Know Thy Neighbour #4.

SPACED is assisted by the Western Australian and Australian Governments through the Department of Creative Industries, Tourism and Sport and Creative Australia.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for We Are Guardians, our Vessel x Cinema Politica event. Special thanks to Ilona Mc...
12/05/2026

Thank you to everyone who joined us for We Are Guardians, our Vessel x Cinema Politica event. Special thanks to Ilona McGuire and Jess Boyce, and to everyone who stayed for the discussion and shared these insightful reflections and actions:

Start small, Care for your patch, learn about where you are, learn who your custodians are and seek a deeper understanding of place. 

Draw on your unique skillset. How can you care more for the environment and the forests? Talk to a friend about the film, talk to your family, talk to your neighbour. It’s so much easier to discuss logging, deforestation, and climate with people who already trust you.. 

We need to reforest our hearts and minds to reforest the world. The mindset that got us to this point is not going to save us. This fight is mine, this fight is yours, this fight is ours.

Read the book Ancestral futures written by Ailton Krenak, Indigenous thinker and activist.

Follow Bibbul Ngarma Aboriginal Association and WAFA’s work, for more local and get involved.

Vessel Contemporary is elated to be offering Western Australian audiences a rare opportunity to engage deeply with Khale...
07/05/2026

Vessel Contemporary is elated to be offering Western Australian audiences a rare opportunity to engage deeply with Khaled Sabsabi’s practice on a local scale through the exhibition ‘Between Suns’ in August. 

Nina Juniper, our Co-Director, sums it up well:

‘As a new independent organisation, the opportunity for Vessel to present a survey of this scale — nearly thirty years of Khaled Sabsabi’s practice — is something we are extremely proud of. The timing couldn’t be more significant — Khaled is, at this very moment, representing Australia at Venice. Our Walyalup/Fremantle community is creative, curious and engaged, and there is a hunger for this kind of programming and we want ’Between Suns’ to feel like an invitation — to sit with the work, to be moved by it, and to find themselves in it’’

Vessel wants to extend a heartfelt congratulations to Khaled, Michael and Mikala, and the whole team for the opening at the Venice Biennale.

‘Between Suns’, is opening on 07 August. Curated by Mikala Tai, the exhibition brings together works spanning 1998 to 2026, including new and unexhibited works, transforming Vessel into an immersive, multi-sensory experience.

Read more in the link in bio.

Photography: Ebony Vukelic

Thank you to all who came along and experienced JSUK HAN’s ‘Organs, Breathes, Salt’ last week. Friday’s evening performa...
07/05/2026

Thank you to all who came along and experienced JSUK HAN’s ‘Organs, Breathes, Salt’ last week. Friday’s evening performance was activated live by JSUK, Sage Pbbbt (ritual vocalist) and Raras Sukardi (bass clarinetist).

‘Both real-time audio feedback and field recordings gathered directly around Fremantle are played simultaneously, projected through a 10-channel multichannel sound system using SPAT, a spatial audio system. Multiple variables are collected and feed into each other continuously: real-time Fremantle weather data (wind speed, wind direction, humidity, temperature and atmospheric pressure), flocking algorithms — a kind of digital murmuration — and the measured resonant frequencies of the Naval Store building itself, all fed into a feedback loop in constant circulation. Because these three systems interact continuously, the sound is never the same twice

My practice is grounded in the history of feedback and systems-based art — Alvin Lucier, John Cage, and the broader tradition of site-specific sound work. Philosophically I am drawn to ideas around self-organisation, circular structure and repetition — Deleuze’s thinking on difference and repetition, Zhuangzi, the feedback loop as a model for how things persist and transform over time..’- JSUK HAN

Co-presented by Vessel and Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre.

We thank our event sponsors Willoughby Wines, Otherside Brewing and Lightning MInds for the ongoing support.

Photography: Ezra Alcantra

03/05/2026

Our next Vessel x Cinema Politica event is on Wednesday 06 May, 6.30-9 pm.
‘We are Guardians’ is a dramatic and energetic journey into the daring struggle of Indigenous land-defenders in the Brazilian Amazon that connects ecological balance with environmental activism.

The documentary is a rich, intimate journey meeting the many people who are living an intricate daily balance in the Amazon basin, one of the world’s most disrupted and threatened regions. We follow Indigenous leader and activist Puyr Tembé and forest guardian Marçal Guajajara as they fight to protect their territories from deforestation, as well as an illegal logger who has no choice but to cut the forest down to feed his family, and a large landowner at the mercy of thousands of invaders and extractive industry. Through intimate, character focused storytelling, the film reveals the many intertwined social and economic issues driving this complicated landscape.

More information and tickets in bio. Spaces are limited so secure your tickets now!

Thank you to Bendigo Community Bank - Fremantle, our Supporting Partner of the Vessel x Cinema Politica Series.

Vessel is thrilled to present our second speaker for the Vessel x Cinema Politica screening of ‘We Are Guardians’ on nex...
30/04/2026

Vessel is thrilled to present our second speaker for the Vessel x Cinema Politica screening of ‘We Are Guardians’ on next Wednesday 06 May:

Ilona Mcguire is an artist of Noongar and Kungarakan descent. Her bloodlines run from the southwest of this continent through to the Top End in the Fitzmaurice River region of the Northern Territory. Her lifelong learning journey continues as she works in close collaboration with her family, cultural expression and historical contexts to bring creative storytelling through her visual, written and performing work.

More information and tickets in bio. Spaces are limited so secure your tickets now!

Thank you to Bendigo Community Bank - Fremantle, our Supporting Partner of the Vessel Contemporary Cinema Politica Series.

Vessel Contemporary is proud to announce ‘Between Suns’, a major survey exhibition of work by Khaled Sabsabi, opening 7 ...
28/04/2026

Vessel Contemporary is proud to announce ‘Between Suns’, a major survey exhibition of work by Khaled Sabsabi, opening 7 August 2026 at the Naval Store in Fremantle. Curated by Mikala Tai, the exhibition brings together works spanning 1998 to 2026, including new and unexhibited works, transforming Vessel into an immersive, multi-sensory experience.

Working across painting, video, sound, installation and performance, Khaled approaches art as a communicative and ethical space: a shared language through which complex ideas of belonging, faith, power and collectively can be encountered. His work frequently draws on mysticism, ritual and everyday gestures, unfolding across cycles rather than fixed narratives, and inviting audiences into moments of reflection, resonance and exchange.

Sabsabi describes the exhibition as ‘an opportunity to further personal artistic and creative expressions of the undefined routines and the ability to distill space, time and symbolism into the narrative of life.’ 

‘Between Suns’ runs concurrently with Sabsabi’s representation of Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale, offering Western Australian audiences a rare opportunity to engage deeply with an internationally acclaimed artist’s practice on a local scale.

Read more in the link in bio.

Photography: Anna Kucera

Vessel is thrilled to present our first speaker for the Vessel x Cinema Politica screening of ‘We Are Guardians’ on Wedn...
28/04/2026

Vessel is thrilled to present our first speaker for the Vessel x Cinema Politica screening of ‘We Are Guardians’ on Wednesday 06 May:

Jess Boyce is the Director of WA Forest Alliance and has been part of the team since 2022. Jess is passionate about the role of diverse and creative communities in environment and climate justice. She has previously worked in the arts across artist-run-initiatives and community arts centres, including Cool Change Contemporary and Mundaring and Midland Junction Arts Centres.

“I am looking forward to reflecting on deforestation both here on Noongar boodja and afar in the Amazon basin, and its impact on both the human and non-human people who are part of these places. I hope the film prompts reflections on how we all have a responsibility to be guardians for the nature that surrounds us, and we are a part of.”

Tickets and more information in bio

Photography: Ula Majewski

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141 Queen Victoria Street
Perth, WA
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