Join us for a special conversation with visiting Thai artist Natalie Sasi Organ and Melbourne-based artist Elyas Alavi, recipients of the 2026 Debra Porch Award, moderated by Catherine Woolley, UNSW Galleries Curatorial & Public Engagement Officer.
The Debra Porch Award is a three-year partnership between Creative Australia, UNSW Galleries, and SAC Gallery, Bangkok. Established in honour of the life and work of artist and academic Debra Porch, it supports artists in pursuing long-term engagement through international residencies and strengthening strong intercultural connections across the Asia Pacific region.
Natalie Sasi Organ is an artist whose practice explores fragmented histories, cultural hybridity, and the complexities of identity, memory, and belonging. Drawing on archival materials, family histories, and speculative narratives, she creates composite worlds that traverse generations and geographies, examining migration, displacement, and assimilation while challenging dominant Eurocentric histories. Through processes of recollection, recontextualisation, and reclamation, Sasi Organ uncovers overlooked ancestral knowledge and the shifting ambiguities of personal and collective memory.
Elyas Alavi is a visual artist with a multidisciplinary practice that spans painting, installation, moving image, poetry, and performance. Alavi’s practice often examines the complex intersections of race, displacement, memory, gender and sexuality, accounting for hyper invisibilities and troubling received notions of culture and belonging. More specifically, his work complicates histories in the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region and thinks through the links between the globalised condition, settler colonialism, and who is implicated in the mobility and displacement of Black and Brown bodies.
