Sutton Gallery

Raafat Ishak at Linden New Art
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Newly commissioned work by Raafat Ishak is featured in the current exhibition ‘Time Moves Through These Walls: 40 Years of Linden New Art’, celebrating the experimental spirit of the pioneering Melbourne contemporary art venue.
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Presented across three works, Ishak’s installation pays tribute to Moritz Michaelis, who commissioned and built Linden as his family residence, while engaging the architecture of the site itself, particularly this small room and the hidden spaces embedded within the building. Originally a thoroughfare between the dining room at the front of the house and a smoking room, this space once separated activities within the home, functioning as both passage and threshold; a portal marking a before and after.
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Marking the four decades of Linden as a cultural institution, the exhibition excavates the layered histories of this distinctive St Kilda site, engaging with its history from pre-European occupation, to private residence, hotel, and ultimately one of Melbourne’s most iconic contemporary art spaces.
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‘Time Moves Through These Walls: 40 Years of Linden New Art’
Until 24 May 2026
Linden New Art
St Kilda
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Images: Installation views
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Raafat Ishak
‘Ascent and Descent’, 2026
Acrylic and polyurethane on chipboard

Raafat Ishak
‘Moritz Michaelis 1820-1902’, 2026
Oil on canvas
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Raafat Ishak and Matthew Davis,
‘Paddy Mann Australia Day Flyover’, 2026
Soundscape, 2:00 Minutes
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Courtesy the artist and Linden New Art

Today is the final day of ✨

Mia Khin Boe
Walking about
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In her third solo presentation at Sutton Gallery, Boe draws on a variety of emotive visual content ranging from historic colonial documents to 1970s Australian cinema.
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Of note, the work ‘Australia’s Proclamation to the Aborigines’, 2026, sees Boe revisit an early nineteenth century pictogram employed by George Arthur (1784–1854, Governor of present-day lutruwita/Tasmania, then Van Diemen’s Land) to visually articulate the ostensible equal consequence of violent crimes for both settler and first peoples.
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Schematised in a rudimentary four-strip cartoon, the lithographic document emerged at a juncture where the first peoples’ population of lutruwita was being systematically decimated by settler colonialist violence. Boe’s reconstruction of this communication tool reflects a damning, desolate contemporary context, with both encounters of violence resulting in the indiscriminate ex*****on of the indigenous subject.
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Framed by the celestial night sky, Boe hints at the cyclical nature of state violence continually impacting first nations communities throughout Australia.
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Mia Khin Boe
Australia’s Proclamation to the Aborigines 2026, 2026
Oil on board
69.5 x 42.5cm
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Last day 11 April 2026
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Sutton Gallery and Sutton Projects will be closed between 3–7 April for the Easter break.
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We look forward to welcoming you back to the galleries on Wednesday 8 April for the final week of exhibitions by Mia Khin Boe and Saskia Pandji Sakti.
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Wishing everyone a safe and restful break.
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Image:
Mia Khin Boe
‘Under it all’, 2026
Oil on linen
41 x 61cm
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