Artistic depictions of detention, based on Guardian Australia’s publication of leaked files, make you feel a deep kind of horrible about what happened on Nauru

Illustrating the Nauru files: 'We have to fight with something'

The incident report that Melbourne artist Angela Brennan read had all the names redacted.

It said that at 1.35pm one day on Nauru in March 2015 someone told a staff member two children had become upset in maths class. Another family had been medically evacuated to Australia and the children felt left behind. They, or someone else, had seen another detainee self-harm. A man saw them crying.

“He then said: ‘Do I have to kill myself to go to Australia?’ What place makes a [REDACTED] year-old try to kill themselves.’”

Brennan wrote that first quote out in loopy, light-green letters and hung it on canvas like a beach towel.



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Her work is part of All We Can’t See, an exhibition of 33 Australian artists including Ben Quilty, Josh Yeldham, Abdul Abdullah and Janet Laurence – along with current Nauru detainee Abbas Alaboudi and past detainee Ravi – who have responded to the Nauru files, Guardian Australia’s 2016 release of 2,000 leaked reports from Australia’s immigration detention system.

They are stories of violence, self-harm, sexual assault and mental illness inclluding major and minor incidents of people being broken in different ways.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Redacted then said (2018) by Angela Brennan. Photograph: Angela Brennan/All We Can't See

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Seeing an incident report laid out like that on a wall is immediately affecting. Essentially, this is trauma illustrated. Much of the art is direct, sad and wordless, making you feel a deep kind of horrible.

The exhibition is guided by small, individual incident reports. Each sits on a plaque next to the artwork it inspired, and arranged like this, the gallery becomes almost literary.

“What we saw,” says co-curator Arielle Gamble, “was what Richard Flanagan described as an extraordinary trove of short stories that are some of the most important Australian writing of our time.”

“When the (Nauru) files were published, people heard of them but we didn’t feel that many people engaged and read them. The language used in the files is difficult. It’s all official language, names are redacted; it’s not easy text to engage with,” Gamble said.

“But imagery is so immediate and it can engage people in a way that words can’t.”

All We Can’t See – on show at the Yellow House gallery in Sydney – attempts to illustrate these nameless reports to help us remember.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman behind a shower curtain is part of All we can’t see: illustrating the Nauru files, a project to showcase the stories of incident reports written by staff in Australia’s detention centre on Nauru. Photograph: Pia Johnson

Photographer Pia Johnson’s Untitled shows three panels of the artist behind a shower curtain. She has three poses: mouth open, arms up, back to us. It does not make much sense until you read the report below it.

“I was asked on Friday by a fellow teacher if I would sit with an asylum seeker who was sobbing. She is a classroom helper for the children.



“She reported she had been asking for a four-minute shower as opposed to two minutes. Her request has been accepted on the condition of sexual favours. It is a male security person. The security officer wants to view a boy or girl having a shower.”

It is a story I remember reading, all those months ago, but then forgetting. I don’t think I’ll forget it now. It’s an image that can’t really be written around, an event that can’t be explained away.

Like Johnson’s, a lot of the works displayed are quite mute – visually dark or confused, or expressing the pure disbelief of someone who doesn’t know what to do. Tomislav Nicolic’s work is an apology called For All We Can’t See, I am Sorry.

“I felt overwhelmed when I think about the Nauru files,” he writes.



Megan Seres’s depiction of a sexual assault is a clouded, partly rocky rectangle without people. “The actual file is about a woman who went out for the day and she didn’t come back,” she says. “When they found her, she was wandering around naked.”

Seres, whose work frequently looks at the violation and isolation of women, struggled to depict the detainee at the centre of her story. At first she drew her into the portrait, but by the end, removed her entirely.

“I felt she wouldn’t want to be seen naked,” Seres says. “She wouldn’t. By the time I got to the 18th story, she was gone.”

“It’s part of connecting it to the idea of All We Can’t See. To start with, she’s redacted. We actually don’t know who she is. It’s a way of finding her through her statement about what happened to her,” Seres says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Untitled by Megan Seres. Photograph: Megan Seres

In many ways the whole exhibition works as a mnemonic for these anonymised stories. These redacted names are given form, images to hang on to, or, through the artists themselves, a stand-in name.



“Flanagan described them as flash fiction,” says Gamble, “Except, they’re not. They’re real.

“This whole thing really is a practice in empathy. First the artist empathises with the story in the file, then the audience empathises with their work and the person who their file represents. Behind each redacted name, is a name.”

The next step was for Gamble to open the exhibition for public submissions. She and co-curator Daniel New have recreated the Guardian’s Nauru files database on their own website.

Each file is a coloured square and anybody can choose one and submit illustrations. On Thursday, they already had more than 50, many of which hold the same uncomfortable artistic power as any work already in the gallery.

Different angles of the same event pair up to create variations on the same difficult story, like Dorothy Maniero’s submission and Johnson’s shower photographs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Artwork by Dorothy Maniero, uploaded as a public submission to All We Can’t See. Photograph: Dorothy Maniero/All We Can't See

The exhibition opens with an extract of a poem by S Nagaveeran, also known as Ravi, a former detainee who spent three years on Nauru after travelling to Australia from Sri Lanka by boat.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A public submission to All We Can’t See by WH Chong. “[REDACTED 1] informed SCA caseworker that his partner [REDACTED] tried to commit suicide by overdosing on medication pills ...[REDACTED 1] stated Wilsons officer then stepped on her sons picture, kicked them and told them to shut up. It was following this that she got upset, went to her room and took the pills.” Photograph: WH Chong/All We Can't See

He believes Brennan’s piece to be the one that best sums up the despair of the Nauru files, and the trauma of being in detention.

“It says: ‘I want to kill myself’. It’s not easy to say. When they thought like that, at the bottom of their heart, it says: that’s it.

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“A simple word, a four-letter word that I can say: Nauru is like a hell. When we are in the detention centre there’s no hopes, there’s no dreams. We can’t keep hope with anything. But still we have to fight with something to get better.

“Lots of Australians are giving hope to them. Because they’re doing lots of activities and fighting for the refugees, that’s kind of hope. We still are thinking that people are fighting for our freedom, that’s the main hope we always get. That’s the small hope – that there are people fighting for our freedom.”

• All We Can’t See is showing at the Yellow House Gallery in Sydney from 2-10 February

• Panel discussions run on 3 and 10 February featuring Elaine Pearson from Human Rights Watch, refugee and former detainee Mohammad Ali Baqiri, journalists Paul Farrell, Ben Doherty and more