Recently West Space, in Naarm/Melbourne’s inner-north, announced the recipients of their 2024 Commission series: Gabi Briggs and Akil Ahamat. Each artist will work closely with West Space for a minimum of twelve months to develop new work for presentation in the main gallery housed within multi-arts precinct Collingwood Yards in 2024. West Space will offer financial, conceptual, and logistical support for the development of their project, as well as support to secure funding in line with the vision for the artists’ outcome.
The 2024 Commissions were selected from applications from across Australia by the West Space Artist Committee: Aida Azin, Sophie Cassar, Tristen Harwood, James Nguyen, Jahkarli Romanis, and Mark Shorter, with Director Joanna Kitto and Curator Sebastian Henry-Jones.

Gabi Briggs, IRBELA_Turn into transcendence, 2022, installation view, Bus Projects, Collingwood Yards, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist and West Space, Melbourne
Briggs is an Anaiwan and Gumbayngirr gedyura, a research-based artist, weaver, and community organiser. Her practice reflects a commitment to returning back to Indigenous knowledges and addresses pressing issues like the climate crisis. Briggs engages with the complexities of race, power, and truth-telling through her art, seeking to restore Indigenous sovereignty and enact self-determination.
Harwood says, “Gabi Briggs is an artist and community organiser whose work engages Indigenous land-based practice and land justice across physical and virtual terrains. Drawing inspiration from her grandmother she is attentive to Indigenous art, literary history, and kinship aesthetics.
The work that Gabi has proposed, which comprises installation and sound, will carve out a temporary autonomous space inside the gallery, attending to the biofacticity of Indigenous sovereignty. The Artist Committee was impressed by Gabi’s depth of commitment to multiple facets of contemporary practice and her eagerness to expand exhibition making possibilities.”

Akil Ahamat, Dawn of a day too dark to call tomorrow (still), 2021, QSXGA video with stereo sound. Courtesy the artist and West Space, Melbourne
Ahamat is a Sri Lankan Malay artist, filmmaker, and arts worker currently based on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. Working across video, sound, performance, and installation, Ahamat considers the physical and social isolation of online experience and its effects in configuring contemporary subjectivity. Among their research influences, they draw especially on the use of ASMR in online spaces as a self-administered therapeutic tool, translating its restorative effects into intimate audio experiences.
On Ahamat, Nguyen says, “Akil Ahamat is an artist whose works continue to be incredibly sensitive and moving. Creating a new body of work on ‘slow cinema for short attention spans’, Akil has proposed a compelling multichannel installation that will reshape the viewers’ experience of cinema and stillness.”
Previous recipients include Grace Culley, Victoria Pham & Joel Spring, Anna Louise Richardson & Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, and Jason Phu.