June 6 – June 26

Main Gallery

More details to follow

the air does not hold us continues Spivak’s investigation into his own inherited history and the transmission of culture across generations. Expanding earlier material and conceptual concerns – developed over two periods of research and exhibition (A Study of the Boy with Wings, Athens, Greece, 2023 and Crossing a Shoreless Sea, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, 2025) – Spivak’s latest body of work considers how familial memory is shaped by distance and rupture. In this ongoing study, identity emerges as a condition of being carried, but never held.

In Spivak’s work, memory and lineage take form in surfaces that shimmer, fracture, and hold traces of both time and touch. Utilising materials embedded with cultural and economic significance, Spivak explores traditional Ukrainian practices surrounding craft, food and family. His processes
reveal that these materials are not static, and refuse a fixed state, similar to that of a diasporic body refusing assimilation. And it is in these small, almost unwitnessed moments of rejection, that self-preservation emerges, anchoring identity and tradition within place, within material.

Sunflower seed, anthracite coal and brass are important global exports of Ukraine – here representative of industry and abundance – and are used in situ with the more intimate practices of Ukraine’s domestic life. Embroidery, handmade pierogi, and archival family photographs exist as materials to host, and to hold; carrying their memory with them as they navigate oceans, move
across borders, and shared over generations. Individual, and collective, strength coexist in works that are simultaneously intimate, suspended, and enduring.

This sense of suspension – of existing between states, and sites – positions Spivak’s practice within a broader diasporic condition, where belonging is continually negotiated rather than secured. Here, material becomes both witness and agent – absorbing gestures, preserving residues, and asserting
its own forms of resistance. The tactile nature of these works invites an embodied encounter, asking viewers to consider how histories are not only seen, but felt, carried, and continually re-inscribed. In this way, Spivak’s practice moves beyond representation, instead activating material as a site where personal and collective narratives converge and persist.

the air does not hold us reflects on what it means to inherit a history that cannot be fully grasped, only carried forward. Through material, gesture, and repetition, Spivak articulates a practice grounded in care, persistence, and quiet resistance – where identity is continually formed through acts of holding, sharing, and remembering. In the liminal space between rupture and continuity, this exhibition insists on the endurance of cultural memory, not as something fixed, but as something lived, negotiated, and sustained across time.

This exhibition has been supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Grants